called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some
containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and
goldfinches—I should think at least twenty.

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

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

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

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

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

The birds began to stir and chirp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Surely,” said I. “It’s very plain.”

“What is it?”

“J.”

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

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

“What does that spell?” he asked me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course you may, cousin Richard.”

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

“Never, I hope, cousin Richard!” said Ada gently.

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI

Quite at Home

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that Mr. Jarndyce’s waggon?” said Richard, calling to our
post-boy.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “Going to London.”

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

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

   John Jarndyce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Floored!” cried Mr. Jarndyce.

I was rather alarmed again.

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

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

“The little Jellybys,” said Richard, coming to my relief, “are
really—I can’t help expressing myself strongly, sir—in a devil of a
state.”

“She means well,” said Mr. Jarndyce hastily. “The wind’s in the
east.”

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

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

“Rheumatism, sir?” said Richard.

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

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

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

“Oh, cousin—” Ada hastily began.

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

“Then, cousin John—” Ada laughingly began again.

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

“It did better than that. It rained Esther.”

“Aye?” said Mr. Jarndyce. “What did Esther do?”

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

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

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

“In the north as we came down, sir.”

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

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

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

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

“More children, Esther!” said Ada.

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

We felt that he must be very interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For you, miss, if you please,” said she.

“For me?” said I.

“The housekeeping keys, miss.”

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

“Yes,” said I. “That is my name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh! I don’t know!” cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.

“I think I do know,” said Mr. Jarndyce.

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

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

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

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

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

“Took?” said I.

“Took, miss. Sudden,” said the maid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And it sounds—somehow it sounds,” said Mr. Skimpole, “like a small
sum?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“May I ask, sir, what is—”

“Coavinses?” said the strange man. “A ’ouse.”

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

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

“Not a bit on it,” said the strange man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the reply was, “Cut away, then!”

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

“Know’d it yes’day aft’noon at tea-time,” said Coavinses.

“It didn’t affect your appetite? Didn’t make you at all uneasy?”

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

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

“Nobody said they warn’t, in MY hearing,” returned Coavinses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We neither of us quite knew what to answer.

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

“Really, sir,” said Richard, “I don’t think it would be honourable in
me to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon us—”

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

“Indeed, sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Being quite a child, sir,” said I, “and so different from other
people—”

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

Certainly! Certainly! we said.

“And he IS a child. Now, isn’t he?” asked Mr. Jarndyce, brightening
more and more.

He was indeed, we said.

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

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

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

We all confirmed it from our night’s experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

The Ghost’s Walk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They say I am like my father, grandmother.”

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

“Thriving, grandmother, in every way.”

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

“He is quite happy?” says she.

“Quite.”

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

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

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

“I hope I have not driven her away?”

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

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

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

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

“What company is this, Rosa?” says Mrs. Rouncewell.

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

“Read it, my dear Watt,” says the housekeeper.

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

“Mr. Guppy” is all the information the card yields.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear me!” says Mr. Guppy. “Who’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know it, sir.” Rosa is shyer than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And disgrace, grandmother—” says Watt.

“Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold,” returns the housekeeper.

Her grandson apologizes with “True. True.”

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

“Pretty well, grandmother, I think.”

“Set it a-going.”

Watt sets it a-going—music and all.

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

“I certainly can!”

“So my Lady says.”

CHAPTER VIII

Covering a Multitude of Sins

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

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

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

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

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

“You must be here very seldom, sir,” said I.

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

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

“There! There!” he said. “That’s over. Pooh! Don’t be foolish.”

“It shall not happen again, sir,” I returned, “but at first it is
difficult—”

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

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

“Of course, Esther,” he said, “you don’t understand this Chancery
business?”

And of course I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

“How changed it must be now!” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“How changed it is!” I said again.

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

“I hope, sir—” said I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “‘Little old woman, and whither so high?’
    ‘To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.’”

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

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

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

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

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

“More what, guardian?” said I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About myself, sir?” said I.

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have been visiting, I understand,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, “at Mrs.
Jellyby’s?”

We said yes, we had passed one night there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are very pleasantly situated here!” said Mrs. Pardiggle.

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

“You know Mr. Gusher?” said our visitor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you mean your husband?” said I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IX

Signs and Tokens

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

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

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

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

“Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman,” Richard
would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his
pleasant laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, “that I can’t
get on without her. Before I begin my harum-scarum day—grinding away