Bleak House
Bleak HousePREFACE CHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIVCHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVICHAPTER XVIICHAPTER XVIIICHAPTER XIXCHAPTER XXCHAPTER XXICHAPTER XXIICHAPTER XXIIICHAPTER XXIXCHAPTER XXVCHAPTER XXVICHAPTER XXVIICHAPTER XXVIIICHAPTER XXIXCHAPTER XXXCHAPTER XXXICHAPTER XXXIICHAPTER XXXIIICHAPTER XXXIVCHAPTER XXXVCHAPTER XXXVICHAPTER XXXVIICHAPTER XXXVIIICHAPTER XXXIXCHAPTER XLCHAPTER XLICHAPTER XLIICHAPTER XLIIICHAPTER XLIVCHAPTER XLVCHAPTER XLVICHAPTER XLVIICHAPTER XLVIIICHAPTER XLIXCHAPTER LCHAPTER LICHAPTER LIICHAPTER LIIICHAPTER LIVCHAPTER LVCHAPTER LVICHAPTER LVIICHAPTER LVIIICHAPTER LIXCHAPTER LXCHAPTER LXICHAPTER LXIICHAPTER LXIIICHAPTER LXIVCHAPTER LXVCHAPTER LXVICHAPTER LXVIICopyright
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
PREFACE
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one
of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring
under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though
the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I
thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost
immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in
its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been
entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty
public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most
determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery
judges appointed—I believe by Richard the Second, but any other
king will do as well.This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the
body of this book or I should have restored it to Conversation
Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must
have originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:"My nature is subduedTo what it works in, like the dyer's hand:Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!"But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should
know what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I
mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning
the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth.
The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual
occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was
professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong
from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there
is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years
ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to
appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount
of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is
(I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was
begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet
decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century
and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds
has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the
shame of—a parsimonious public.There is only one other point on which I offer a word of
remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion
has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend
Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing
to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious
letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing
that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need
to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers
and that before I wrote that description I took pains to
investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of
which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi
Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe
Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in
letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he
afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all
rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed
in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous instance happened at
Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat,
one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject
was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having
murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was
acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died
the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I
do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that
general reference to the authorities which will be found at page
30, vol. ii., the recorded opinions and experiences of
distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in
more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not
abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable
spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences
are usually received.In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side
of familiar things.
CHAPTER I
In ChanceryLondon. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much
mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the
face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for
the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound
interest.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green
aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among
the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping
on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides
of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching
the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets,
much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours
before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard
and unwilling look.The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest,
and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old
obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a
leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar,
in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord
High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud
and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering
condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of
hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and
earth.On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought
to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head,
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a
large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an
interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such
an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery
bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten
thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on
slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running
their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words
and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players
might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause,
some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who
made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a
line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth
at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk
gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions,
affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports,
mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court
be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang
heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the
stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day
into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep
in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance
by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the
roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into
the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs
are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which
has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire,
which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in
every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod
heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round
of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means
abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances,
patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the
heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners
who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, "Suffer any
wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky
afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause,
two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of
solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the
judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or
petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal
court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever
falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was
squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the
reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers
invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and
Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at
the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained
sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is
always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always
expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour.
Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows
for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in
a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of
paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in
custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application
"to purge himself of his contempt," which, being a solitary
surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration
about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any
knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his
prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who
periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to
address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business and who
can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is
legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a
quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an
eye on the judge, ready to call out "My Lord!" in a voice of
sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers'
clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the
chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather
a little.Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit
has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive
knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it
has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it
for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all
the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause;
innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old
people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously
found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without
knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds
with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a
new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has
grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into
the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and
grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone
out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into
mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon
the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains
out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce
still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially
hopeless.Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the
only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but
it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a
reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or
other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said
about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select
port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been
in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord
Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the
eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the
sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers"—a pleasantry that particularly tickled
the maces, bags, and purses.How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has
stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be
a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files
reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly
writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six
Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery
folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been
made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination,
spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there
are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors'
boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time
out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly
engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra
moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and
Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of
money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a
contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have
lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will
look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done
for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall
be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many
varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even
those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle
of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of
letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose
belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner
never meant to go right.Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog,
sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of
Chancery."Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly
something restless under the eloquence of that learned
gentleman."Mlud," says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce
and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to
have read anything else since he left school."Have you nearly concluded your argument?""Mlud, no—variety of points—feel it my duty tsubmit—ludship,"
is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle."Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I
believe?" says the Chancellor with a slight smile.Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a
little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen
hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their
eighteen places of obscurity."We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,"
says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question
of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and
really will come to a settlement one of these days.The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought
forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My lord!"
Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at
the man from Shropshire."In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, "to the young girl—""Begludship's pardon—boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely. "In
reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to
the young girl and boy, the two young people"—Mr. Tangle
crushed—"whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now
in my private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the
expediency of making the order for their residing with their
uncle."Mr. Tangle on his legs again. "Begludship's
pardon—dead.""With their"—Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass
at the papers on his desk—"grandfather.""Begludship's pardon—victim of rash
action—brains."Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice
arises, fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and
says, "Will your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a
cousin, several times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to
inform the court in what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a
cousin."Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message)
ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops,
and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can
see him."I will speak with both the young people," says the
Chancellor anew, "and satisfy myself on the subject of their
residing with their cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow
morning when I take my seat."The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner
is presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's
conglomeration but his being sent back to prison, which is soon
done. The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative "My
lord!" but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously
vanished. Everybody else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue
bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by
clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents;
the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed
and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up with it,
and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre—why so much the
better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce!
CHAPTER II
In FashionIt is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on
this same miry afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery
but that we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow
flies. Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are
things of precedent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who
have played at strange games through a deal of thundery weather;
sleeping beauties whom the knight will wake one day, when all the
stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to turn
prodigiously!It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of
ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when
you have made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void
beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there
are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place.
But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much
jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the
larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It
is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want
of air.My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few
days previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship
intends to stay some weeks, after which her movements are
uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of
the Parisians, and it knows all fashionable things. To know things
otherwise were to be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down
at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her "place" in
Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the
bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent
low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river
with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all
over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock's place has
been extremely dreary. The weather for many a day and night has
been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings
and prunings of the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as
they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they
pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and
its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise,
coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The
view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a
lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone
terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy
drops fall—drip, drip, drip—upon the broad flagged pavement, called
from old time the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays the little
church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a
cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the
ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is
childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a
keeper's lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed
panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a
woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a
wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of
temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to
death."Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in
Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the
rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants. The
pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into
the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has
passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they
will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence—which,
like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the
future—cannot yet undertake to say.Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no
mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and
infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the
world might get on without hills but would be done up without
Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a
little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an
idea dependent for its execution on your great county families. He
is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness
and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you
may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least
impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate,
truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly
unreasonable man.Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my
Lady. He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six,
nor yet sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and
walks a little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his
light-grey hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white
waistcoat, and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned.
He is ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my
Lady, and holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation.
His gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted
her, is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him.Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about
that she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much
family that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more.
But she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense
enough to portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station,
added to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady
Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and
at the top of the fashionable tree.How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer,
everybody knows—or has some reason to know by this time, the matter
having been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock, having
conquered HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the
freezing, mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an
equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or
satisfaction, are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly
well-bred. If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she
might be expected to ascend without any rapture.She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is
not yet in its autumn. She has a fine face—originally of a
character that would be rather called very pretty than handsome,
but improved into classicality by the acquired expression of her
fashionable state. Her figure is elegant and has the effect of
being tall. Not that she is so, but that "the most is made," as the
Honourable Bob Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, "of all
her points." The same authority observes that she is perfectly got
up and remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is
the best-groomed woman in the whole stud.With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has
come up from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the
fashionable intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town
previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to
stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. And at
her house in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents
himself an old-fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke
solicitor of the High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of
acting as legal adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron
boxes in his office with that name outside as if the present
baronet were the coin of the conjuror's trick and were constantly
being juggled through the whole set. Across the hall, and up the
stairs, and along the passages, and through the rooms, which are
very brilliant in the season and very dismal out of it—fairy-land
to visit, but a desert to live in—the old gentleman is conducted by
a Mercury in powder to my Lady's presence.The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have
made good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and
aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a
mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be
the silent depository. There are noble mausoleums rooted for
centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and
the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad
among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what
is called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any school that
seems never to have been young—and wears knee-breeches tied with
ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black
clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is
that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing
light, his dress is like himself. He never converses when not
professionally consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless but
quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses
and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable
intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half
the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" He
receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with
the rest of his knowledge.Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.
Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is
always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of
tribute. He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of
tribute in that too. It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in
a general way, retainer-like. It expresses, as it were, the steward
of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the
Dedlocks.Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so,
or it may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be
noted in everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a
class—as one of the leaders and representatives of her little
world. She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out
of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals—seeing herself in her
glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet every dim little star
revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian
Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses,
and caprices and lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a
measure of her moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical
proportions. Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new
dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new
chapel, a new anything, to be set up? There are deferential people
in a dozen callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but
prostration before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if
she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who,
humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and
her whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear
them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the
majestic Lilliput. "If you want to address our people, sir," say
Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers—meaning by our people Lady Dedlock
and the rest—"you must remember that you are not dealing with the
general public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and
their weakest place is such a place." "To make this article go
down, gentlemen," say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their
friends the manufacturers, "you must come to us, because we know
where to have the fashionable people, and we can make it
fashionable." "If you want to get this print upon the tables of my
high connexion, sir," says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you
want to get this dwarf or giant into the houses of my high
connexion, sir, or if you want to secure to this entertainment the
patronage of my high connexion, sir, you must leave it, if you
please, to me, for I have been accustomed to study the leaders of
my high connexion, sir, and I may tell you without vanity that I
can turn them round my finger"—in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an
honest man, does not exaggerate at all.Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing
in the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he
may."My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has
it, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his
hand."Yes. It has been on again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies,
making one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the
fire, shading her face with a hand-screen."It would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the
dreariness of the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether
anything has been done.""Nothing that YOU would call anything has been done to-day,"
replies Mr. Tulkinghorn."Nor ever will be," says my Lady.Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery
suit. It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of
thing. To be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in
question, her part in which was the only property my Lady brought
him; and he has a shadowy impression that for his name—the name of
Dedlock—to be in a cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a
most ridiculous accident. But he regards the Court of Chancery,
even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a
trifling amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction
with a variety of other somethings by the perfection of human
wisdom for the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything.
And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the
sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting it would
be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up
somewhere—like Wat Tyler."As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file," says
Mr. Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the
troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with
any new proceedings in a cause"—cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn,
taking no more responsibility than necessary—"and further, as I see
you are going to Paris, I have brought them in my
pocket."(Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the
delight of the fashionable intelligence was in his
Lady.)Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to
place them on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts
on his spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded
lamp."'In Chancery. Between John Jarndyce—'"My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the
formal horrors as he can.Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again
lower down. My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her
attention. Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and
appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and
prolixities as ranging among the national bulwarks. It happens that
the fire is hot where my Lady sits and that the hand-screen is more
beautiful than useful, being priceless but small. My Lady, changing
her position, sees the papers on the table—looks at them
nearer—looks at them nearer still—asks impulsively, "Who copied
that?"Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation
and her unusual tone."Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full
at him in her careless way again and toying with her
screen."Not quite. Probably"—Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he
speaks—"the legal character which it has was acquired after the
original hand was formed. Why do you ask?""Anything to vary this detestable monotony. Oh, go on,
do!"Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again. The heat is greater; my Lady
screens her face. Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and
cries, "Eh? What do you say?""I say I am afraid," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen
hastily, "that Lady Dedlock is ill.""Faint," my Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it
is like the faintness of death. Don't speak to me. Ring, and take
me to my room!"Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring,
feet shuffle and patter, silence ensues. Mercury at last begs Mr.
Tulkinghorn to return."Better now," quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to
sit down and read to him alone. "I have been quite alarmed. I never
knew my Lady swoon before. But the weather is extremely trying, and
she really has been bored to death down at our place in
Lincolnshire."
CHAPTER III
A Progress
I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my
portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew
that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used
to say to my doll when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am
not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me,
like a dear!" And so she used to sit propped up in a great
arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at
me—or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing—while I busily
stitched away and told her every one of my secrets.
My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom
dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody
else. It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be
to me when I came home from school of a day to run upstairs to my
room and say, "Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be
expecting me!" and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the
elbow of her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we
parted. I had always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, oh,
no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I
should like to understand it better. I have not by any means a
quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it
seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity.
I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance—like some of
the princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming—by my
godmother. At least, I only knew her as such. She was a good, good
woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning
prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there
were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had
ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel—but
she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very
good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her
frown all her life. I felt so different from her, even making every
allowance for the differences between a child and a woman; I felt
so poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never could be
unrestrained with her—no, could never even love her as I wished. It
made me very sorry to consider how good she was and how unworthy of
her I was, and I used ardently to hope that I might have a better
heart; and I talked it over very often with the dear old doll, but
I never loved my godmother as I ought to have loved her and as I
felt I must have loved her if I had been a better girl.
This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I
naturally was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I
felt at ease. But something happened when I was still quite a
little thing that helped it very much.
I had never heard my mama spoken of. I had never heard of my
papa either, but I felt more interested about my mama. I had never
worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown
my mama's grave. I had never been told where it was. Yet I had
never been taught to pray for any relation but my godmother. I had
more than once approached this subject of my thoughts with Mrs.
Rachael, our only servant, who took my light away when I was in bed
(another very good woman, but austere to me), and she had only
said, "Esther, good night!" and gone away and left me.
Although there were seven girls at the neighbouring school
where I was a day boarder, and although they called me little
Esther Summerson, I knew none of them at home. All of them were
older than I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal),
but there seemed to be some other separation between us besides
that, and besides their being far more clever than I was and
knowing much more than I did. One of them in the first week of my
going to the school (I remember it very well) invited me home to a
little party, to my great joy. But my godmother wrote a stiff
letter declining for me, and I never went. I never went out at
all.
It was my birthday. There were holidays at school on other
birthdays—none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other
birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one
another—there were none on mine. My birthday was the most
melancholy day at home in the whole year.
I have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as
I know it may, for I may be very vain without suspecting it, though
indeed I don't), my comprehension is quickened when my affection
is. My disposition is very affectionate, and perhaps I might still
feel such a wound if such a wound could be received more than once
with the quickness of that birthday.
Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the
table before the fire. The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not
another sound had been heard in the room or in the house for I
don't know how long. I happened to look timidly up from my
stitching, across the table at my godmother, and I saw in her face,
looking gloomily at me, "It would have been far better, little
Esther, that you had had no birthday, that you had never been
born!"
I broke out crying and sobbing, and I said, "Oh, dear
godmother, tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my
birthday?"
"No," she returned. "Ask me no more, child!"
"Oh, do pray tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear
godmother, if you please! What did I do to her? How did I lose her?
Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my fault,
dear godmother? No, no, no, don't go away. Oh, speak to me!"
I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold
of her dress and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the
while, "Let me go!" But now she stood still.
Her darkened face had such power over me that it stopped me
in the midst of my vehemence. I put up my trembling little hand to
clasp hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but
withdrew it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering
heart. She raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before her,
said slowly in a cold, low voice—I see her knitted brow and pointed
finger—"Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.
The time will come—and soon enough—when you will understand this
better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can. I have
forgiven her"—but her face did not relent—"the wrong she did to me,
and I say no more of it, though it was greater than you will ever
know—than any one will ever know but I, the sufferer. For yourself,
unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first of these
evil anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of others be not
visited upon your head, according to what is written. Forget your
mother and leave all other people to forget her who will do her
unhappy child that greatest kindness. Now, go!"
She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her—so
frozen as I was!—and added this, "Submission, self-denial, diligent
work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on
it. You are different from other children, Esther, because you were
not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set
apart."
I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's
cheek against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend
upon my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding
of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to
anybody's heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was
to me.
Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together
afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my
birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I
could to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I
confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I
grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do
some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I
hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it.
I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help
their coming to my eyes.
There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again
properly.
I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much
more after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in
her house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more
difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my
heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school
companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a
widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who
came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and
tried to be very diligent.
One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my
books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I
was gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out
of the parlour-door and called me back. Sitting with her, I
found—which was very unusual indeed—a stranger. A portly,
important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white
cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a
large seal-ring upon his little finger.
"This," said my godmother in an undertone, "is the child."
Then she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, "This is
Esther, sir."
The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said,
"Come here, my dear!" He shook hands with me and asked me to take
off my bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he
said, "Ah!" and afterwards "Yes!" And then, taking off his
eye-glasses and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his
arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my
godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go
upstairs, Esther!" And I made him my curtsy and left him.
It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost
fourteen, when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the
fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come
down at nine o'clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and
was reading from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing
with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to
him.
"So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and
said unto them, 'He that is without sin among you, let him first
cast a stone at her!'"
I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to
her head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part
of the book, "'Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find
you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all,
Watch!'"
In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these
words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her
voice had sounded through the house and been heard in the
street.
She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay
there, little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute
frown that I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a
time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by
her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked
her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness,
entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me.
No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even
afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened.
On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the
gentleman in black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent
for by Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had
never gone away.
"My name is Kenge," he said; "you may remember it, my child;
Kenge and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn."
I replied that I remembered to have seen him once
before.
"Pray be seated—here near me. Don't distress yourself; it's
of no use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted
with the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her
and that this young lady, now her aunt is dead—"
"My aunt, sir!"
"It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no
object is to be gained by it," said Mr. Kenge smoothly, "Aunt in
fact, though not in law. Don't distress yourself! Don't weep! Don't
tremble! Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard
of—the—a—Jarndyce and Jarndyce."
"Never," said Mrs. Rachael.
"Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his
eye-glasses, "that our young friend—I BEG you won't distress
yourself!—never heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!"
I shook my head, wondering even what it was.
"Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, looking over
his glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if
he were petting something. "Not of one of the greatest Chancery
suits known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a
monument of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every
difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form
of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over
again? It is a cause that could not exist out of this free and
great country. I should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce
and Jarndyce, Mrs. Rachael"—I was afraid he addressed himself to
her because I appeared inattentive"—amounts at the present hour to
from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty THOUSAND POUNDS!" said Mr. Kenge, leaning
back in his chair.
I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it
even then.
"And she really never heard of the cause!" said Mr. Kenge.
"Surprising!"
"Miss Barbary, sir," returned Mrs. Rachael, "who is now among
the Seraphim—"
"I hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Kenge politely.
"—Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to
her. And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing
more."
"Well!" said Mr. Kenge. "Upon the whole, very proper. Now to
the point," addressing me. "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in
fact that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none)
being deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs.
Rachael—"
"Oh, dear no!" said Mrs. Rachael quickly.
"Quite so," assented Mr. Kenge; "—that Mrs. Rachael should
charge herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't
distress yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of
an offer which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two
years ago and which, though rejected then, was understood to be
renewable under the lamentable circumstances that have since
occurred. Now, if I avow that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce
and otherwise, a highly humane, but at the same time singular, man,
shall I compromise myself by any stretch of my professional
caution?" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and
looking calmly at us both.
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own
voice. I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and
gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to
himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to
his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I
was very much impressed by him—even then, before I knew that he
formed himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and
that he was generally called Conversation Kenge.
"Mr. Jarndyce," he pursued, "being aware of the—I would say,
desolate—position of our young friend, offers to place her at a
first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed,
where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants
shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to
discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has
pleased—shall I say Providence?—to call her."
My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his
affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though
I tried.
"Mr. Jarndyce," he went on, "makes no condition beyond
expressing his expectation that our young friend will not at any
time remove herself from the establishment in question without his
knowledge and concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself
to the acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of
which she will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the
paths of virtue and honour, and—the—a—so forth."
I was still less able to speak than before.
"Now, what does our young friend say?" proceeded Mr. Kenge.
"Take time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take
time!"
What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I
need not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it
were worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying
hour, I could never relate.
This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as
far as I knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with
all necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for
Reading.
Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but
I was not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to
have known her better after so many years and ought to have made
myself enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When
she gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a
thaw-drop from the stone porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so
miserable and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it
was my fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!
"No, Esther!" she returned. "It is your misfortune!"
The coach was at the little lawn-gate—we had not come out
until we heard the wheels—and thus I left her, with a sorrowful
heart. She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof
and shut the door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back
at it from the window through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs.
Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be
a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed
to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging
outside in the frost and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped
the dear old doll in her own shawl and quietly laid her—I am half
ashamed to tell it—in the garden-earth under the tree that shaded
my old window. I had no companion left but my bird, and him I
carried with me in his cage.
When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in
the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the
high window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful
pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last
night's snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and
the ice, dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed
the snow away. There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the
opposite seat and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings, but
he sat gazing out of the other window and took no notice of
me.
I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to
her, of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the
strange place I was going to, of the people I should find there,
and what they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a
voice in the coach gave me a terrible start.
It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?"
I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only
answer in a whisper, "Me, sir?" For of course I knew it must have
been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was
still looking out of his window.
"Yes, you," he said, turning round.
"I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered.
"But you are!" said the gentleman. "Look here!" He came quite
opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of
his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and
showed me that it was wet.
"There! Now you know you are," he said. "Don't you?"
"Yes, sir," I said.
"And what are you crying for?" said the gentleman, "Don't you
want to go there?"
"Where, sir?"
"Where? Why, wherever you are going," said the
gentleman.
"I am very glad to go there, sir," I answered.
"Well, then! Look glad!" said the gentleman.
I thought he was very strange, or at least that what I could
see of him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and
his face was almost hidden in a fur cap with broad fur straps at
the side of his head fastened under his chin; but I was composed
again, and not afraid of him. So I told him that I thought I must
have been crying because of my godmother's death and because of
Mrs. Rachael's not being sorry to part with me.
"Confound Mrs. Rachael!" said the gentleman. "Let her fly
away in a high wind on a broomstick!"
I began to be really afraid of him now and looked at him with
the greatest astonishment. But I thought that he had pleasant eyes,
although he kept on muttering to himself in an angry manner and
calling Mrs. Rachael names.
After a little while he opened his outer wrapper, which
appeared to me large enough to wrap up the whole coach, and put his
arm down into a deep pocket in the side.
"Now, look here!" he said. "In this paper," which was nicely
folded, "is a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for
money—sugar on the outside an inch thick, like fat on mutton chops.
Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and quality),
made in France. And what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat
geese. There's a pie! Now let's see you eat 'em."
"Thank you, sir," I replied; "thank you very much indeed, but
I hope you won't be offended—they are too rich for me."
"Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all
understand, and threw them both out of window.
He did not speak to me any more until he got out of the coach
a little way short of Reading, when he advised me to be a good girl
and to be studious, and shook hands with me. I must say I was
relieved by his departure. We left him at a milestone. I often
walked past it afterwards, and never for a long time without
thinking of him and half expecting to meet him. But I never did;
and so, as time went on, he passed out of my mind.
When the coach stopped, a very neat lady looked up at the
window and said, "Miss Donny."
"No, ma'am, Esther Summerson."
"That is quite right," said the lady, "Miss Donny."
I now understood that she introduced herself by that name,
and begged Miss Donny's pardon for my mistake, and pointed out my
boxes at her request. Under the direction of a very neat maid, they
were put outside a very small green carriage; and then Miss Donny,
the maid, and I got inside and were driven away.
"Everything is ready for you, Esther," said Miss Donny, "and
the scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance
with the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce."
"Of—did you say, ma'am?"
"Of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce," said Miss Donny.
I was so bewildered that Miss Donny thought the cold had been
too severe for me and lent me her smelling-bottle.
"Do you know my—guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, ma'am?" I asked after
a good deal of hesitation.
"Not personally, Esther," said Miss Donny; "merely through
his solicitors, Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of London. A very
superior gentleman, Mr. Kenge. Truly eloquent indeed. Some of his
periods quite majestic!"
I felt this to be very true but was too confused to attend to
it. Our speedy arrival at our destination, before I had time to
recover myself, increased my confusion, and I never shall forget
the uncertain and the unreal air of everything at Greenleaf (Miss
Donny's house) that afternoon!
But I soon became used to it. I was so adapted to the routine
of Greenleaf before long that I seemed to have been there a great
while and almost to have dreamed rather than really lived my old
life at my godmother's. Nothing could be more precise, exact, and
orderly than Greenleaf. There was a time for everything all round
the dial of the clock, and everything was done at its appointed
moment.
We were twelve boarders, and there were two Miss Donnys,
twins. It was understood that I would have to depend, by and by, on
my qualifications as a governess, and I was not only instructed in
everything that was taught at Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged
in helping to instruct others. Although I was treated in every
other respect like the rest of the school, this single difference
was made in my case from the first. As I began to know more, I
taught more, and so in course of time I had plenty to do, which I
was very fond of doing because it made the dear girls fond of me.
At last, whenever a new pupil came who was a little downcast and
unhappy, she was so sure—indeed I don't know why—to make a friend
of me that all new-comers were confided to my care. They said I was
so gentle, but I am sure THEY were! I often thought of the
resolution I had made on my birthday to try to be industrious,
contented, and true-hearted and to do some good to some one and win
some love if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt almost ashamed to
have done so little and have won so much.
