D

arkness rests upon Tom-all-Alone’s. Dilating and dilating since the sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it fills every void in the place. For a time

there were some dungeon lights burning, as the lamp of Life burns in Tom-all-Alone’s, heavily, heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking—as that lamp, too, winks in Tom-all-Alone’s—at many horrible things. But they are blotted out. The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and blasted by volcanic fires; but she has passed on, and is gone. The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on Tom-all-Alone’s, and Tom is fast asleep.

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind, or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise, there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody’s theory but nobody’s practice. And, in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.

But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.

It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone’s be uglier by day or by night; but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it. The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom.

A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude for sleep to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a restless pillow, strolls hitherward at this quiet time. Attracted by curiosity, he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the miserable byways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness, and to have studied it before.

On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the main street of Tom-all-Alone’s, nothing is to be seen but the crazy houses, shut up and silent. No waking creature save himself appears, except in one direction, where he sees the solitary figure of a woman sitting on a doorstep. He walks that way. Approaching, he observes that she has journeyed a long distance, and is footsore and travel-stained. She sits on the doorstep in the manner of one who is waiting, with her elbow on her knee and her head upon her hand. Beside her is a canvas bag, or bundle, she has carried. She is dozing probably, for she gives no heed to his steps as he comes toward her.

The broken footway is so narrow, that when Allan Woodcourt comes to where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her. Looking down at her face, his eye meets hers, and he stops.

“What is the matter?” “Nothing sir.”

“Can’t you make them hear? Do you want to be let in?”

“I’m waiting till they get up at another house—a lodging- house—not here,” the woman patiently returns. “I’m waiting here because there will be sun here presently to warm me.”

“I am afraid you are tired. I am sorry to see you sitting in the street.”

“Thank you sir. It don’t matter.”

A habit in him of speaking to the poor, and of avoiding patronage or condescension, or childishness (which is the favourite device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books), has put him on good terms with the woman easily.

“Let me look at your forehead,” he says, bending down. “I am a doctor. Don’t be afraid. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.”

He knows that by touching her with his skilful and accustomed hand, he can soothe her yet more readily. She makes a slight objection, saying, “It’s nothing;” but he has scarcely laid his fingers on the wounded place when she lifts it up to the light.

“Aye! A bad bruise, and the skin sadly broken. This must be very sore.”

“It do ache a little, sir,” returns the woman, with a started tear upon her cheek.

“Let me try to make it more comfortable. My handkerchief won’t hurt you.”

“O dear no, sir, I’m sure of that!”

He cleanses the injured place and dries it; and having carefully examined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes a small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up. While he is thus employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a surgery in the street:

“And so your husband is a brickmaker?”

“How you know that, sir?” asked the woman, astonished.

“Why, I suppose so, from the colour of the clay upon your bag and on your dress. And I know brickmakers go about working at piecework in places. And I am sorry to say I have known them cruel to their wives too.”

The woman hastily lifts up her eyes, as if she would deny that her injury is referable to such a cause. But feeling the hand upon her forehead, and seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops them again.

“Where is he now?” asks the surgeon.

“He got into trouble last night, sir; but he’ll look for me at the lodging-house.”

“He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive him, brutal as he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved it. You have no young child?”

The woman shakes her head. “One as I calls mine, sir, but it’s Liz’s.”

“Your own is dead. I see! Poor little thing!”

By this time he has finished, and is putting up his case. “I suppose you have some settled home. Is it far from here?” he asks, good-humouredly making light of what he has done, as she gets up and curtseys.

“It’s a good two or three-and-twenty mile from here, sir. At Saint Albans. You know Saint Albans, sir? I thought you gave a start like, as if you did?”

“Yes, I know something of it. And now I will ask you a question in return. Have you money for your lodging?”

“Yes, sir,” she says, “really and truly.” And she shows it. He tells her, in acknowledgement of her many subdued thanks, that she is very welcome, gives her good day, and walks away. Tom-all- Alone’s is still asleep, and nothing is astir.

Yes, something is! As he retraces his way to the point from which he descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls—which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid—and furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth, whose face is hollow, and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is so intent on getting along unseen, that even the

apparition of a stranger in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the way, and goes shrinking and creeping on, with his anxious hand before him, and his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what purpose, or of what material, it would be impossible to say. They look, in colour and in substance, like a bundle of rank leaves of swampy growth, that rotted long ago.

Allan Woodcourt pauses to look after him and note all this, with a shadowy belief that he has seen the boy before. He cannot recall how, or where; but there is some association in his mind with such a form. He imagines that he must have seen it in some hospital or refuge; still, cannot make out why it comes with any special force on his remembrance.

He is gradually emerging from Tom-all-Alone’s in the morning light, thinking about it, when he hears running feet behind him; and looking round, sees the boy, scouring towards him at great speed, followed by the woman.

“Stop him, stop him!” cries the woman, almost breathless. “Stop him, sir!”

He darts across the road into the boy’s path, but the boy is quicker than he—makes a curve—ducks—dives under his hands— comes up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again. Still, the woman follows, crying, “Stop him, sir, pray stop him!” Allan, not knowing but that he has just robbed her of her money, follows in chase, and runs so hard, that he runs the boy down a dozen times; but each time he repeats the curve, the duck, the dive, and scours away again. To strike at him, on any of these occasions, would be to fell and disable him; but the pursuer cannot

resolve to do that; and so the grimly ridiculous pursuit continues. At last the fugitive, hard-pressed, takes to a narrow passage, and a court which has no thoroughfare. Here, against a hoarding of decaying timber, he is brought to bay, and tumbles down, lying gasping at his pursuer, who stands and gasps at him until the woman comes up.

“O you, Jo!” cries the woman. “What? I have found you at last!” “Jo,” repeats Allan, looking at him with attention. “Jo! Stay. To be sure! I recollect this lad some time ago being brought before

the coroner.”

“Yes, I see you once afore at the Inkwhich,” whimpers Jo. “What of that? Can’t you never let such an unfortnet as me alone? An’t I unfortnet enough for you yet? How unfortnet do you want me for to be? Iv’e been a-chivied and a-chivied, fust by one on you and nixt by another on you, till I’m worritted to skins and bones. The Inkwhich warn’t my fault. I done nothink. He wos wery good to me he wos; he wos the only one I know’d to speak to, as ever come across my crossing. It ain’t wery likely I should want him to be Inkwhich’d. I only wish I wos, myself. I don’t know why I don’t go and make a hole in the water, I’m sure I don’t.

He says it with such a pitiable air, and his grimy tears appear so real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excresence produced there in neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him. He says to the woman, “Miserable creature, what has he done?”

To which she only replies, shaking her head at the prostrate figure more amazedly than angrily: “Oh you, Jo, you Jo. I have found you at last!”

“What has he done?” says Allan. “Has he robbed you?”

“No sir, no. Robbed me? He did nothing but what was kind- hearted by me, and that’s the wonder of it.”

Allan looks from Jo to the woman, and from the woman to Jo, waiting for one of them to unravel the riddle.

“But he was along with me, sir,” says the woman,—“O you Jo!—he was along with me, sir, down at Saint Albans, ill, and a young lady, Lord bless her for a good friend to me, took pity on him when I durstn’t, and took him home—” Allan shrinks back from him with a sudden horror.

“Yes sir, yes. Took him home, and made him comfortable, and like a thankless monster he ran away in the night, and never has been seen or heard of since, till I set eyes on him just now. And that young lady that was such a pretty dear, caught his illness, lost her beautiful looks, and wouldn’t hardly be known for the same young lady now, if it wasn’t for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet voice. Do you know it? You ungrateful wretch, do you know that this is all along of you and of her goodness to you?” demands the woman, beginning to rage at him as she recalls it, and breaking into passionate tears.

The boy, in rough sort stunned by what he hears, falls to smearing his dirty forehead with his dirty palm, and to staring at the ground, and to shaking from head to foot until the crazy hoarding against which he leans, rattles.

Allan restrains the woman, merely by a quiet gesture, but effectually.

“Richard told me,” he falters, “—I mean I have heard of this— don’t mind me for a moment, I will speak presently.”

He turns away, and stands for a while looking out at the

covered passage. When he comes back, he has recovered his composure; except that he contends against an avoidance of the boy, which is so very remarkable, that it absorbs the woman’s attention.

“You hear what she says. But get up, get up!”

Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises, and stands, after the manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his high shoulders against it, and covertly rubbing his right hand over his left, and his left foot over his right.

“You hear what she says, and I know it’s true. Have you been here ever since?”

“Whishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone’s till this blessed morning,” replies Jo, hoarsely.

“Why have you come here now?”

Jo looks all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no higher than the knees, and finally answers:

“I don’t know how to do nothink, and I can’t get nothink to do. I’m wery poor and ill, and I thought I’d come back here when there warn’t nobody about, and lay down and hide somewheres as I knows on till after dark, and then go and beg a trifle of Mr Sangsby. He wos allus willin fur to give me sumthink he wos, though Mrs Sangsby she wus allus a-chivying on me—like everybody everywheres.”

“Where have you come from?”

Jo looks all round the court again, looks at his questioner’s knees again, and concludes by laying his profile against the hoarding in a sort of resignation.

“Did you hear me ask you where you have come from?” “Tramp then,” says Jo.

“Now, tell me,” proceeds Allen, making a strong effort to overcome his repugnance, going very near to him, and leaning over him with an expression of confidence, “tell me how it came about that you left that house, when the good young lady had been so unfortunate as to pity you, and take you home.”

Jo suddenly comes out of his resignation, and excitedly declares, addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady, that he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, that he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he’d sooner have had his unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a- nigh her, and that she wos wery good to him, she wos. Conducting himself throughout as if in his poor fashion he really meant it, and winding up with some very miserable sobs.

Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham. He constrains himself to touch him. “Come Jo. Tell me.”

“No. I dustn’t,” says Jo, relapsing into the profile state. “I dustn’t, or I would.”

“But I must know,” returns the other, “all the same. Come Jo.”

After two or three of such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head again, looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, “Well, I’ll tell you something. I wos took away. There!”

“Took away? In the night?”

“Ah!” Very apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him, and even glances up some ten feet at the top of the hoarding, and through the cracks in it, lest the object of his distrust should be looking over, or hidden on the other side.

“Who took you away?”

“I dustn’t name him,” says Jo. “I dustn’t do it, sir.”

“But I want, in the young lady’s name, to know. You may trust

me. No one else shall hear.”

“Ah, but I don’t know,” replies Jo, shaking his head fearfully, “as he don’t hear.”

“Why, he is not in this place.”

“Oh, ain’t he though?” says Jo. “He’s in all manner of places, all at wanst.”

Allan looks at him in perplexity, but discovers some real meaning and good faith at the bottom of this bewildering reply. He patiently awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more baffled by his patience than by anything else, at last desperately whispers a name in his ear.

“Ay!” says Allan. “Why, what had you been doing?”

“Nothink, sir. Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble, ’sept in not moving on and the Inkwhich. But I’m a moving on now. I’m a moving on to the berryin ground—that’s the move as I’m up to.”

“No, no, we will try to prevent that. But what did he do with you?”

“Put me in a horsepittle,” replied Jo, whispering, “till I was discharged, then give me a little money—four half bulls, wot you may call half-crowns—and ses ‘Hook it! Nobody wants you here,’ he ses. ‘You hook it. You go and tramp,’ he ses. ‘You move on,’ he ses. ‘Don’t let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of London, or you’ll repent it.’ So I shall, if ever he does see me, and he’ll see me if I’m above ground,” concludes Jo, nervously repeating all his former precautions and investigations.

Allan considers a little: then remarks, turning to the woman, but keeping an encouraging eye on Jo; “He is not so ungrateful as you supposed. He had a reason for going away, though it was an

insufficient one.”

“Thank’ee, sir, thank’ee!” exclaims Jo. “There now! See how hard you wos upon me. But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn ses, and it’s all right. For you wos wery good to me, and I knows too it.”

“Now, Jo,” says Allan, keeping his eye upon him, “come with me, and I will find you a better place than this to lie down and hide in. If I take one side of the way and you the other to avoid observation, you will not run away, I know very well, if you make me a promise.”

“I won’t not unless I wos to see him a-coming, sir.”

“Very well. I take your word. Half the town is getting up by this time, and the whole town will be broad awake in another hour. Come along. Good day again, my good woman,” “Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times again.”

She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises and takes it up. Jo repeating, “Ony you tell the young lady as I never went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!” nods and shambles and shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and half cries, a farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along after Allan Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite side of the street. In this order, the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone’s into the broad rays of the sunlight and the purer air.

Chapter 47

Jo’s Will

s Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets, where the high church spires and the distances are so near and clear in the morning light that the city itself

seems renewed by rest, Allan revolves in his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion. “It surely is a strange fact,” he considers, “that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unknown dog.” But it is none the less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains.

As first he looks behind him often, to assure himself that Jo is still really following. But, look where he will, he still beholds him close to the opposite houses, making his way with his wary hand from brick to brick and from door to door, and often, as he creeps along, glancing over at him, watchfully. Soon satisfied that the last thing in his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on; considering with a less divided attention what he shall do.

A breakfast-stall at a street corner suggests the first thing to be done. He stops there, looks round, and beckons Jo. Jo crosses, and comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the knuckles of his right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left— kneading dirt with a natural pestle and mortar. What is a dainty repast to Jo is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the coffee, and to gnaw the bread and butter; looking anxiously about him in all directions as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal.

But he is so sick and miserable, that even hunger has abandoned him. “I thought I was amost a starvin, sir,” says Jo, soon putting down his food; “but I don’t know nothink—not even that. I don’t care for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on ’em.” And Jo stands shivering, and looking at the breakfast wonderingly. Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his pulse, and on his chest.

“Draw breath, Jo!”

“It draws,” says Joe, “as heavy as a cart.” He might add, “and rattles like it;” but he only mutters, “I’m a-moving on, sir.”

Allan looks about for an apothecary’s shop. There is none at hand, but a tavern does as well or better. He obtains a little measure of wine, and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully. He begins to revive, almost as soon as it passes his lips. “We may repeat that dose, Jo,” observes Allan, after watching him with his attentive face. “So! Now we will take five minutes rest, and then go on again.”

Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of the breakfast-stall, with his back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt paces up and down in the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards him without appearing to watch him. It requires no discernment to perceive that he is warmed and refreshed. If a face so shaded can brighten, his face brightens somewhat; and, by little and little, he eats the slice of bread he had so hopelessly laid down. Observant of these signs of improvement, Allan engages him in conversation; and elicits to his no small wonder the adventure of the lady in the veil, with all its consequences. Jo slowly munches, as he slowly tells it. When he has finished his story and his bread, they go on again.

Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of

refuge for the boy, to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite, Allan leads the way to the court where he and Jo first foregathered. But all is changed at the rag-and-bottle shop; Miss Flite no longer lodges there; it is shut up; and a hard-featured female, much obscured by dust, whose age is a problem—but who is indeed no other than the interesting Judy—is tart and spare in her replies. These sufficing, however, to inform the visitor that Miss Flite and her birds are domiciled with a Mrs Blinder, in Bell Yard, he repairs to that neighbouring place; where Miss Flite (who rises early that she may be punctual at the Divan of justice held by her excellent friend the Chancellor) comes running downstairs, with tears of welcome and with open arms.

“My dear physician!” cries Miss Flite. “My meritorious, distinguished, honourable officer!” She uses some odd expressions, but is as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be—more so than it often is. Allan, very patient with her, waits until she has no more raptures to express; then points out Jo, trembling in a doorway, and tells her how he comes there.

“Where can I lodge him hereabouts for the present? Now you have a fund of knowledge and good sense, and can advise me.”

Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets herself to consider; but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her. Mrs Blinder is entirely let, and she herself occupies poor Gridley’s room. “Gridley!” exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands, after a twentieth repetition of this remark. “Gridley! To be sure! of course! My dear physician! General George will help us out.”

It is hopeless to ask for any information about General George, and would be, though Miss Flite had not already run upstairs to put on her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl, and to arm

herself with her reticule of documents. But as she informs her physician, in her disjointed manner, on coming down in full array, that General George, whom she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz-Jarndyce, and takes a great interest in all connected with her, Allan is induced to think that they may be in the right way. So he tells Jo, for his encouragement, that this walking about will soon be over now; and they repair to the General’s. Fortunately it is not far.

From the exterior of George’s Shooting Gallery, and the long entry, and the bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well. He also descries promise in the figure of Mr George himself, striding towards them in his morning exercise with his pipe in his mouth, no stock on, and his muscular arms, developed by broadsword and dumbbell, weightily asserting themselves through his light shirt-sleeves.

“Your servant, sir,” says Mr George with a military salute. Good-humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into his crisp hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and at some length she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation. He winds it up with another “Your servant, sir!” and another salute.

“Excuse me, sir. A sailor I believe?” says Mr George.

“I am proud to find I have the air of one,” returns Allan; “But I am only a sea-going doctor.”

“Indeed, sir! I should have thought you was a regular blue- jacket, myself.”

Allan hopes Mr George will forgive his intrusion the more readily on that account, and particularly that he will not lay aside his pipe, which, in his politeness, he has testified some intention of

doing. “You are very good, sir,” returns the trooper. “As I know, by experience, that it’s not disagreeable to Miss Flite, and since it’s equally agreeable to yourself—” and finishes the sentence by putting it between his lips again. Allan proceeds to tell him all he knows about Jo; unto which the trooper listens with a grave face.

“And that’s the lad, sir, is it?” he inquires, looking along the entry to where Jo stands staring up at the great letters on the whitewashed front, which have no meaning in his eyes.

“That’s he,” says Allan. “And, Mr George, I am in this difficulty about him. I am unwilling to place him a hospital, even if I could procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not stay there many hours, if he could be so much as got there. The same objection applies to a workhouse; supposing I had the patience to be evaded and shirked, and handed about from post to pillar in trying to get him into one—which is a system that I don’t take kindly to.”

“No man does, sir,” returns Mr George.

“I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because he is possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who ordered him to keep out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes this person to be everywhere, and cognisant of everything.”

“I ask your pardon, sir,” says Mr George. “But you have not mentioned that party’s name. Is it a secret, sir?”

“The boy makes it one. But the name is Bucket.” “Bucket the Detective, sir?”

“The same man.”

“The man is known to me, sir,” returns the trooper, after blowing out a cloud of smoke, and squaring his chest; “and the boy

is so far correct that he undoubtedly is a—rum customer.” Mr George smokes with a profound meaning after this, and surveys Miss Flite in silence.

“Now, I wish Mr Jarndyce and Miss Summerson at least to know that this Jo, who tells so strange a story, has reappeared; and to have it in their power to speak with him, if they should desire to do so. Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any poor lodging kept by decent people, where he would be admitted. Decent people and Jo, Mr George,” says Allan, following the direction of the trooper’s eyes along the entry, “have not been much acquainted, as you see. Hence the difficulty. Do you happen to know any one in this neighbourhood, who would receive him for a while, on my paying for him beforehand?”

As he puts the question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little man, standing at the trooper’s elbow, and looking up, with an oddly twisted figure and countenance, into the trooper’s face. After a few more puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks down askant at the little man, and the little man winks up at the trooper.

“Well sir,” says Mr George, “I can assure you that I would willingly be knocked on the head at any time, if it would be at all agreeable to Miss Summerson; and consequently I esteem it a privilege to do that young lady any service, however small. We are naturally in the vagabond way here, sir, both myself and Phil. You see what the place is. You are welcome to a quiet corner of it for the boy, if the same would meet your views. No charge made, except for rations. We are not in a flourishing state of circumstances here, sir. We are liable to be tumbled out neck and crop, at a moment’s notice. However, sir, such as the place is, and so long as it lasts, here it is at your service.”

With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr George places the whole building at his visitor’s disposal.

“I take it for granted, sir,” he adds, “you being one of the medical staff, that there is no present infection about this unfortunate subject?”

Allan is quite sure of it.

“Because, sir,” says Mr George, shaking his head sorrowfully, “we have had enough of that.”

His tone is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance. “Still, I am bound to tell you,” observes Allan, after repeating his former assurance, “that the boy is deplorably low and reduced; and that he may be—I do not say that he is—too far gone to recover.”

“Do you consider him in present danger, sir?” inquires the trooper.

“Yes, I fear so.”

“Then, sir,” returns the trooper, in a decisive manner, “it appears to me—being naturally in the vagabond way myself—that the sooner he comes out of the street, the better. You Phil! Bring him in!”

Mr Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of command; and the trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by. Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle’s Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs Jellyby’s lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites

devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee.

He shuffles slowly into Mr George’s gallery, and stands huddled together in a bundle, looking all about the floor. He seems to know that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he is, and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He is of no order and no place; neither of the beasts, nor of humanity.

“Look here, Jo!” says Allan. “This is Mr George.”

Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a moment, and then down again.

“He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging- room here.”

Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow. After a little more consideration, and some backing and changing of the foot on which he rests, he mutters that he is “wery thankful.”

“You are quite safe here. All you have to do at present is to be obedient, and to get strong. And mind you tell us the truth here, whatever you do, Jo.”

“Wishermaydie if I don’t, sir,” says Jo, reverting to his favourite declaration. “I never done nothink yit, but wot you knows on, to get myself into no trouble. I never was in no other trouble at all, sir—’sept not knowin’ nothink and starwation.”

“I believe it. Now attend to Mr George. I see he is going to

speak to you.”

“My intention merely was, sir,” observes Mr George, amazingly broad and upright, “to point out to him where he can lie down, and get a thorough good dose of sleep. Now, look here.” As the trooper speaks, he conducts them to the other end of the gallery, and opens one of the little cabins. “There you are, you see! Here is a mattress, and here you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as Mr, I ask your pardon, sir;” he refers apologetically to the card Allan has given him; “Mr Woodcourt pleases. Don’t you be alarmed if you hear shots; they’ll be aimed at the target and not you. Now, there’s another thing I would recommend, sir,” says the trooper, turning to his visitor. “Phil, come here!”

Phil bears down upon them according to his usual tactics. “Here is a man, sir, who was found, when a baby, in the gutter.

Consequently, it is to be expected that he takes a natural interest in this poor creature. You do, don’t you, Phil?”

“Certainly and surely I do, guv’ner,” is Phil’s reply.

“Now I was thinking, sir,” says Mr George, in a martial sort of confidence, as if he were giving his opinion in a council of war at a drum-head, “that if this man was to take him to a bath, and was to lay out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse articles—”

“Mr George, my considerate friend,” returns Allan, taking out his purse, “it is the very favour I would have asked.”

Phil Squod and Jo are sent out immediately on this work of improvement. Miss Flite, quite enraptured by her success, makes the best of her way to Court; having great fears that otherwise her friend the Chancellor may be uneasy about her, or may give the judgment she has so long expected, in her absence; and observing “which you know, my dear physician, and general, after so many

years, would be too absurdly unfortunate!” Allan takes the opportunity of going out to procure some restorative medicines; and obtaining them near at hand, soon returns to find the trooper walking up and down the gallery and to fall into step and walk with him.

“I take it, sir,” says Mr George, “that you know Miss Summerson pretty well?”

Yes, it appears.

“Not related to her, sir?” No, it appears.

“Excuse the apparent curiosity,” says Mr George. “It seemed to me probable that you might take more than a common interest in this poor creature, because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortunate interest in him. ’Tis my case, sir, I assure you.”

“And mine, Mr George.”

The trooper looks sideways at Allan’s sunburnt cheek and bright dark eye, rapidly measures his height and build, and seems to approve of him.

“Since you have been out, sir, I have been thinking that I unquestionably know the rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Bucket took the lad, according to his account. Though he is not acquainted with the name, I can help you to it. It’s Tulkinghorn. That’s what it is.”

Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name. “Tulkinghorn. That’s the name, sir. I know the man; and know

him to have been in communication with Bucket before, respecting a deceased person who had given him offence. I know the man, sir. To my sorrow.”

Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is?

“What kind of man. Do you mean to look at?”

“I think I know that much of him. I mean to deal with.

Generally, what kind of man?”

“Why, then I’ll tell you, sir,” returns the trooper, stopping short, and folding his arms on his square chest, so angrily, that his face fires and flushes all over; “he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood, than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man—by George!—that has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more dissatisfaction with myself, than all other men put together. That’s the kind of man Mr Tulkinghorn is!”

“I am sorry,” says Allan, “to have touched so sore a place.” “Sore?” The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm

of his broad right hand, and lays it on his imaginary moustache. “It’s no fault of yours, sir; but you shall judge. He has got a power over me. He is the man I spoke of just now, as being able to tumble me out of this place neck and crop. He keeps me on a constant see- saw. He won’t hold off, and he won’t come on. If I have a payment to make him, or time to ask him for, or anything to go to him about, he don’t see me, don’t hear me—passes me on to Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn, Melchisedech’s in Clifford’s Inn passes me back again to him—he keeps me prowling and dangling about him, as if I was made of the same stone as himself. Why, I spend half my life now, pretty well loitering and dodging about his door. What does he care? Nothing. Just as much as the rusty old carbine I have compared him to. He chafes and goads me, till— Bah! nonsense—I am forgetting myself. Mr Woodcourt;” the trooper resumes his march; “all I say is, he is an old man; but I am glad I shall never have the chance of setting spurs to my horse,

and riding at him in a fair field. For if I had that chance, in one of the humours he drives me into—he’d go down, sir!”

Mr George has been so excited, that he finds it necessary to wipe his forehead on his shirt-sleeve. Even while he whistles his impetuosity away with the National Anthem, some involuntary shakings of his head and heavings of his chest still linger behind; not to mention an occasional hasty adjustment with both hands of his open shirt-collar, as if it were scarcely open enough to prevent his being troubled by a choking sensation. In short, Allan Woodcourt has not much doubt about the going down of Mr Tulkinghorn on the field referred to.

Jo and his conductor presently return, and Jo is assisted to his mattress by the careful Phil; to whom, after due administration of medicine by his own hands, Allan confides all needful means and instructions. The morning is by this time getting on apace. He repairs to his lodgings to dress and breakfast; and then, without seeking rest, goes away to Mr Jarndyce to communicate his discovery.

With him Mr Jarndyce returns alone, confidentially telling him that there are reasons for keeping this matter very quiet indeed; and showing a serious interest in it. To Mr Jarndyce, Jo repeats in substance what he said in the morning; without any material variation. Only, that cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws with a hollower sound.

“Let me lay here quiet, and not be chivied no more,” falters Jo; “and be so kind any person as is a-passin’ nigh where I used fur to sweep, as jist to say to Mr Snagsby that Jo, wot he known once, is a-moving on right forards with his duty, and I’ll be wery thankful. I’d be more thankful than I am aready, if it wos any ways possible

for an unfortnet to be it.”

He makes so many of these references to the law-stationer in the course of a day or two, that Allan, after conferring with Mr Jarndyce, good-naturedly resolves to call in Cook’s Court; the rather, as the cart seems to be breaking down.

To Cook’s Court, therefore, he repairs. Mr Snagsby is behind his counter in his grey coat and sleeves, inspecting an Indenture of several skins which has just come in from the engrosser’s; an immense desert of law-hand and parchment, with here and there a resting-place of a few large letters to break the awful monotony, and save the traveller from despair. Mr Snagsby puts up at one of these inky wells, and greets the stranger with his cough of general preparation for business.

“You don’t remember me, Mr Snagsby?”

The stationer’s heart begins to thump heavily, for his old apprehensions have never abated. It is as much as he can do to answer, “No, sir, I can’t say I do. I should have considered—not to put too fine a point upon it—that I never saw you before, sir.”

“Twice before,” says Allan Woodcourt. “Once at a poor bedside, and once—”

“It’s come at last!” thinks the afflicted stationer, as recollection breaks upon him. “It’s got to a head now, and is going to burst!” But, he has sufficient presence of mind to conduct his visitor into the little counting-house, and to shut the door.

“Are you a married man, sir?” “No, I am not.”

“Would you make the attempt, though single,” says Mr Snagsby in a melancholy whisper, “to speak as low as you can? For my little woman is a listening somewheres, or I’ll forfeit the business

and five hundred pound!”

In deep dejection Mr Snagsby sits down on his stool, with his back against his desk, protesting:

“I never had a secret of my own, sir. I can’t charge my memory with ever having once attempted to deceive my little woman on my own account, since she named the day. I wouldn’t have done it, sir. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I couldn’t have done it, I durstn’t have done it. Whereas, and nevertheless, I find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, till my life is a burden to me.”

His visitor professes his regret to hear it, and asks him does he remember Jo? Mr Snagsby answers with a suppressed groan. O don’t he!

“You couldn’t name an individual human being—except myself—that my little woman is more set and determined against than Jo,” says Mr Snagsby.

Allan asks why?

“Why?” repeats Mr Snagsby, in his desperation clutching at the clump of hair at the back of his bald head, “How should I know why? But you are a single person, sir, and may you long be spared to ask a married person such a question!”

With this beneficent wish, Mr Snagsby coughs a cough of dismal resignation, and submits himself to hear what the visitor has to communicate.

“There again!” says Mr Snagsby, who, between the earnestness of his feelings, and the suppressed tones of his voice, is discoloured in the face. “At it again, in a new direction! A certain person charges me, in the solemnest way, not to talk of Jo to any one, even my little woman. Then comes another certain person, in

the person of yourself, and charges me, in an equally solemn way, not to mention Jo to that other certain person above all other persons. Why, this is a private asylum! Why, not to put too fine a point upon it, this is Bedlam, sir!” says Mr Snagsby.

But it is better than he expected, after all; being no explosion of the mine below him, or deepening of the pit into which he has fallen. And being tender-hearted, and affected by the account he hears of Jo’s condition, he readily engages to “look round,” as early in the evening as he can manage it quietly. He looks round very quietly, when the evening comes; but it may turn out that Mrs Snagsby is as quiet a manager as he.

Jo is very glad to see his old friend; and says, when they are left alone, that he takes it uncommon kind as Mr Sangsby should come so far out of his way on accounts of sich as him. Mr Snagsby, touched by the spectacle before him, immediately lays upon the table half-a-crown: that magic balsam of his for all kinds of wounds.

“And how do you find yourself, my poor lad?” inquires the stationer, with his cough of sympathy.

“I am in luck, Mr Sangsby, I am,” returns Jo, “and don’t want for nothink. I’m more cumfbler nor you can’t think. Mr Sangsby! I’m wery sorry that I done it, but I didn’t go fur to do it, sir.”

The stationer softly lays down another half-crown, and asks him what it is that he is sorry for having done?

“Mr Sangsby,” says Jo, “I went and giv a illness to the lady as wos and yit as warn’t the t’other lady, and none of ’em never says nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser good and my having been s’ unfortnet. The lady come herself and see me yesday, and she ses, ‘Ah Jo!’ she ses. ‘We thought we’d lost

you, Jo!’ she ses. And she sits down a-smilin so quiet, and don’t pass a word nor yit a look upon me for having done it, she don’t, and I turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr Sangsby. And Mr Jarnders, I see him a-forced to turn away his own self. And Mr Woodcot, he come fur to give me somethink fur to ease me, wot he’s allus a- doin on day and night, and wen he come a-bendin over me and a- speakin up so bold, I see his tears a-fallin, Mr Sangsby.”

The softened stationer deposits another half-crown on the table. Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible remedy will relieve his feelings.

“Wot I wos a-thinkin on, Mr Sangsby,” proceeds Jo, “wos, as you was able to write wery large, p’raps?”

“Yes, Jo, please God,” returns the stationer.

“Uncommon precious large, p’raps?” says Jo, with eagerness. “Yes, my poor boy.”

Jo laughs with pleasure. “Wot I wos a-thinkin on then, Mr Sangsby, wos, that when I was moved on as fur as ever I could go and couldn’t be moved no furder, whether you might be so good p’raps, as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to do it; and that though I didn’t know nothink at all, I knowd as Mr Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he’d be able to forgive me in his mind. If the writin could be made to say it wery large, he might.”

“It shall say it, Jo. Very large.”

Jo laughs again. “Thankee, Mr Sangsby. Its wery kind of you, sir, and it makes me more cumfbler nor I was afore.”

The meek little stationer, with a broken and unfinished cough,

slips down his fourth half-crown—he has never been so close to a case requiring so many—and is fain to depart. And Jo, and he, upon this little earth, shall meet no more. No more.

For the cart so hard to draw, is near its journey’s end, and drags over stony ground. All round the clock, it labours up the broken steeps, shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun rise, and behold it still upon its weary road.

Phil Squod, with his smoky gunpowder visage, at once acts as nurse and works as armourer at his little table in a corner; often looking round, and saying with a nod of his green baize cap, and an encouraging elevation of his one eyebrow, “Hold up, my boy! Hold up!” There, too, is Mr Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt almost always; both thinking, much, how strangely Fate has entangled this rough outcast in the web of very different lives. There too, the trooper is a frequent visitor: filling the doorway with his athletic figure, and, from his superfluity of life and strength, seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon Jo, who never fails to speak more robustly in answer to his cheerful words.

Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor today, and Allan Woodcourt, newly arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a while, he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards him—just as he sat in the law-writer’s room—and touches his chest and heart. The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more.

The trooper stands in the doorway, still and silent. Phil has stopped in a low clinking noise, with his little hammer in his hand. Mr Woodcourt looks round with that grave professional interest and attention on his face, and, glancing significantly at the

trooper, signs to Phil to carry his table out. When the little hammer is next used, there will be a speck of rust upon it.

“Well, Joe! What is the matter? Don’t be frightened.”

“I thought,” says Jo, who has started, and is looking round, “I thought I was in Tom-all-Alone’s agin. Ain’t there nobody here but you, Mr Woodcot?”

“Nobody.”

“And I ain’t took back to Tom-all-Alone’s. Am I, sir?” “No.” Jo closes his eyes, muttering, “I’m wery thankful.”

After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very near his ear, and says to him in a low, distinct voice:

“Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?” “Never knowd nothink, sir.”

“Not so much as one short prayer?”

“No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr Sangsby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a- speakin’ to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out nothink on it. Different times, there was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone’s a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t’other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a- talking to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t’others, and not a-talkin to us. We never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about.”

It takes him a long time to say this; and few but an experienced and attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him. After a short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, a strong effort to get out of bed.

“Stay, Jo? What now?”

“It’s time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir,” he

returns with a wild look.

“Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo!”

“Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It’s time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. He used fur to say to me, ‘I am as poor as you today, Jo,’ he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now, and have come there to be laid along with him.”

“By and by, Jo. By and by.”

“Ah! P’raps they wouldn’t do it if I wos to go myself. But will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?”

“I will, indeed.”

“Thank’ee, sir. Thank’ee, sir. They’ll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it’s allus locked. And there’s a step there, as I used fur to clean with my broom.—It’s turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?”

“It is coming fast, Jo.”

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.

“Jo, my poor fellow!”

“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.”

“Jo, can you say what I say?”

“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.” “OUR FATHER.”

“Our Father!—yes, that’s wery good, sir.” “WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.”

“Art in Heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?”

“It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME.”

“Hallowed be—thy—”

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion, in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Chapter 48

Closing In

T

he place in Lincolnshire has shut its many eyes again, and the house in town is awake. In Lincolnshire, the Dedlocks of the past doze in their picture-frames, and the low wind

murmurs through the long drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly. In town, the Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed carriages through the darkness of the night, and the Dedlock Mercuries, with ashes (or hair-powder) on their heads, symptomatic of their great humility, loll away the drowsy mornings in the little windows of the hall. The fashionable world-tremendous orb, nearly five miles round—is in full swing, and the solar system works respectfully at its appointed distances.

Where the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest, where all the senses are ministered to with the greatest delicacy and refinement, Lady Dedlock is. From the shining heights she has scaled and taken, she is never absent. Though the belief she of old reposed in herself, as one able to reserve whatsoever she would under her mantel of pride, is beaten down; though she has no assurance that what she is to those around her, she will remain another day; it is not her nature, when envious eyes are looking on, to yield or to droop. They say of her, that she has lately grown more handsome and more haughty. The debilitated cousin says of her that she’s beauty nough—tsetup Shopofwomen—but rather larming kind—remindingmanfact—inconvenient woman—who will getoutofbedandbawthstablishment—Shakespeare.

Mr Tulkinghorn says nothing; looks nothing. Now, as heretofore, he is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white cravat loosely twisted into its old-fashioned tie, receiving patronage from the Peerage and making no sign. Of all men he is still the last who might be supposed to have any influence upon my Lady. Of all women she is still the last who might be supposed to have any dread of him.

One thing has been much on her mind since their late interview in his turret-room at Chesney Wold. She is now decided, and prepared to throw it off.

It is morning in the great world; afternoon according to the little sun. The Mercuries, exhausted by looking out of window, are reposing in the hall; and hang their heavy heads, the gorgeous creatures, like overblown sunflowers. Like them, too, they seem to run to a deal of seed in their tags and trimmings. Sir Leicester, in the library, has fallen asleep for the good of the country, over the report of a Parliamentary committee. My Lady sits in the room in which she gave audience to the young man of the name of Guppy. Rosa is with her, and has been writing for her and reading to her. Rosa is now at work upon embroidery, or some such pretty thing; and as she bends her head over it, my Lady watches her in silence. Not for the first time today.

“Rosa.”

The pretty village face looks brightly up. Then, seeing how serious my Lady is, looks puzzled and surprised.

“See to the door. Is it shut?”

Yes. She goes to it and returns, and looks yet more surprised.

“I am about to place confidence in you, child, for I know I may trust your attachment, if not your judgment. In what I am going to

do, I will not disguise myself to you at least. But I confide in you. Say nothing to any one of what passes between us.”

The timid little beauty promises in all earnestness to be trustworthy.

“Do you know,” Lady Dedlock asks her, signing to her to bring her chair nearer; “do you know, Rosa, that I am different to you from what I am to any one?”

“Yes, my Lady. Much kinder. But then I often think I know you as you really are.”

“You often think you know me as I really am? Poor child, poor child!”

She says it with a kind of scorn—though not of Rosa—and sits brooding, looking dreamily at her.

“Do you think, Rosa, you are any relief or comfort to me? Do you suppose your being young and natural, and fond of me and grateful to me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near me?” “I don’t know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so. But with all my

heart, I wish it was so.” “It is so, little one.”

The pretty face is checked in its flush of pleasure, by the dark expression on the handsome face before it. It looks timidly for an explanation.

“And if I were to say today, Go! Leave me! I should say what would give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what would leave me very solitary.”

“My Lady! Have I offended you?” “In nothing. Come here.”

Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady’s feet. My Lady, with that motherly touch of the famous Iron-master night, lays her

hand upon her dark hair, and gently keeps it there.

“I told you, Rosa, that I wished you to be happy, and that I would make you so if I could make anybody happy on this earth. I can not. There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no part, rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have written to the father of your lover, and he will be here today. All this I have done for your sake.”

The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses, and says what shall she do, what shall she do, when they are separated! Her mistress kisses her on the cheek, and makes no other answer.

“Now, be happy, child, under better circumstances. Be beloved and happy!”

“Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought—forgive my being so free—that you are not happy.”

“I!”

“Will you be more so, when you have sent me away? Pray, pray, think again. Let me stay a little while!”

“I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my own. It is done. What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now— not what I shall be a little while hence. Remember this, and keep my confidence. Do so much for my sake, and thus all ends between us!”

She detaches herself from her simple-hearted companion, and leaves the room. Late in the afternoon, when she next appears upon the staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state. As indifferent as if all passion, feeling, and interest, had been worn out in the earlier ages of the world, and had perished from its surface with its other departed monsters.

Mercury has announced Mr Rouncewell, which is the cause of her appearance. Mr Rouncewell is not in the library; but she repairs to the library. Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to him first.

“Sir Leicester, I am desirous—but you are engaged.” O dear no! Not at all. Only Mr Tulkinghorn.

Always at hand. Haunting every place. No relief or security from him for a moment.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. Will you allow me to retire?” With a look that plainly says, “You know you have the power to remain if you will,” she tells him it is not necessary, and moves towards a chair. Mr Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for her with his clumsy bow, and retires into a window opposite. Interposed between her and the fading light of day in the now quiet street, his shadow falls upon her, and he darkens all before

her. Even so does he darken her life.

It is a dull street under the best conditions; where the two long rows of houses stare at each other with that severity, that half a dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into stone, rather than originally built in that material. It is a street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the stone charges of noble statues. Complicated garnish of iron-work entwines itself over the flights of steps in this awful street; and, from these petrified bowers, extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux gasp at the upstart gas. Here and there a weak little iron hoop, through which bold boys aspire to throw their friends’ caps (its

only present use), retains its place among the rusty foliage, sacred to the memory of departed oil. Nay, even oil itself, yet lingering at long intervals in a little absurd glass pot, with a knob in the bottom like an oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights every night, like its high and dry master in the House of Lords.

Therefore there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair, could wish to see through the window in which Mr Tulkinghorn stands. And yet—and yet—she sends a look in that direction, as if it were her heart’s desire to have that figure removed out of the way.

Sir Leicester begs his Lady’s pardon. She was about to say? “Only that Mr Rouncewell is here (he has called by my

appointment), and that we had better make an end of the question of that girl. I am tired to death of the matter.”

“What can I do—to—assist?” demands Sir Leicester, in some considerable doubt.

“Let us see him here, and have done with it. Will you tell them to send him up?”

“Mr Tulkinghorn, be so good as to ring. Thank you. Request,” says Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately remembering the business term, “request the iron gentleman to walk this way.”

Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and produces him. Sir Leicester receives that ferruginous person, graciously.

“I hope you are well, Mr Rouncewell. Be seated. (My solicitor, Mr Tulkinghorn.) My Lady was desirous, Mr Rouncewell,” Sir Leicester skillfully transfers him with a solemn wave of his hand, “was desirous to speak with you. Hem!”

“I shall be very happy,” returns the iron gentleman, “to give my

best attention to anything Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say.”

As he turns towards her, he finds that the impression she makes upon him is less agreeable than on the former occasion. A distant supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her; and there is nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.

“Pray, sir,” says Lady Dedlock, listlessly, “may I be allowed to inquire whether anything has passed between you and your son, respecting your son’s fancy?”

It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look upon him, as she asks this question.

“If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said, when I had the pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise my son to conquer that—fancy.” The ironmaster repeats her expression with a little emphasis.

“And did you?”

“O! of course I did.”

Sir Leicester gives a nod, approving and confirmatory. Very proper. The iron gentleman having said that he would do it, was bound to do it. No difference in this respect between the base metals and the precious. Highly proper.

“And pray has he done so?”

“Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply. I fear not. Probably not yet. In our condition of life, we sometimes couple an intention with our—our fancies, which renders them not altogether easy to throw off. I think it is rather our way to be in earnest.”

Sir Leicester has a misgiving that there may be a hidden Wat

Tylerish meaning in this expression, and fumes a little. Mr Rouncewell is perfectly good-humoured and polite; but, within such limits, evidently adapts his tone to his reception.

“Because,” proceeds my Lady, “I have been thinking of the subject—which is tiresome to me.”

“I am very sorry, I am sure.”

“And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which I quite concur;” Sir Leicester flattered: “and if you cannot give us the assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion that the girl had better leave me.”

“I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock. Nothing of the kind.”

“Then she had better go.”

“Excuse me, my Lady,” Sir Leicester considerately interposes, “but perhaps this may be doing an injury to the young woman, which she has not merited. Here is a young woman,” says Sir Leicester, magnificently laying out the matter with his right hand, like a service of plate, “whose good fortune it is to have attracted the notice and favour of an eminent lady, and to live, under the protection of that eminent lady, surrounded by the various advantages which such a position confers, and which are unquestionably very great—I believe unquestionably very great, sir—for a young woman in that station of life. The question then arises, should that young woman be deprived of these many advantages and that good fortune, simply because she has—” Sir Leicester, with an apologetic but dignified inclination of his head towards the ironmaster, winds up his sentence—“has attracted the notice of Mr Rouncewell’s son? Now, has she deserved this punishment? Is this just towards her? Is this our previous

understanding?”

“I beg your pardon,” interposes Mr Rouncewell’s son’s father. “Sir Leicester, will you allow me? I think I may shorten the subject. Pray dismiss that from your consideration. If you remember anything so unimportant—which is not to be expected—you would recollect that my first thought in the affair was directly opposed to her remaining here.”

Dismiss the Dedlock patronage from consideration? O! Sir Leicester is bound to believe a pair of ears that have been handed down to him through such a family, or he really might have mistrusted their report of the iron gentleman’s observations.

“It is not necessary,” observes my Lady, in her coldest manner, before he can do anything but breathe amazedly, “to enter into these matters on either side. The girl is a very good girl; I have nothing whatever to say against her; but she is so far insensible to her many advantages and her good fortune, that she is in love—or supposes she is, poor little fool—and unable to appreciate them.”

Sir Leicester begs to observe, that wholly alters the case. He might have been sure that my Lady had the best grounds and reasons in support of her view. He entirely agrees with my Lady. The young woman had better go.

“As Sir Leicester observed, Mr Rouncewell, on the last occasion, when we were fatigued by this business,” Lady Dedlock languidly proceeds, “we cannot make conditions with you. Without conditions, and under present circumstances, the girl is quite misplaced here, and had better go. I have told her so. Would you wish to have her sent back to the village, or would you like to take her with you, or what would you prefer?”

“Lady Dedlock, if I may speak plainly—”

“By all means.”

“—I should prefer the course which will the soonest relieve you of the incumbrance, and remove her from her present position.”

“And to speak as plainly,” she returns, with the same studied carelessness, “so should I. Do I understand that you will take her with you?”

The iron gentleman makes an iron bow.

“Sir Leicester, will you ring?” Mr Tulkinghorn steps forward from his window and pulls the bell. “I had forgotten you. Thank you.” He makes his usual bow, and goes quietly back again. Mercury, swift responsive, appears, receives instructions whom to produce, skims away, produces the aforesaid, and departs.

Rosa has been crying, and is yet in distress. On her coming in, the ironmaster leaves his chair, takes her arm in his, and remains with her near the door ready to depart.

“You are taken charge of, you see,” says my Lady, in her weary manner, “and are going away well protected. I have mentioned that you are a very good girl, and you have nothing to cry for.”

“She seems after all,” observes Mr Tulkinghorn, loitering a little forward with his hands behind him, “as if she were crying at going away.”

“Why, she is not well-bred, you see,” returns Mr Rouncewell with some quickness in his manner, as if he were glad to have the lawyer to retort upon; “and she is an inexperienced little thing, and knows no better. If she had remained here, sir, she would have improved, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” is Mr Tulkinghorn’s composed reply.

Rosa sobs out that she is very sorry to leave my Lady, and that she was happy at Chesney Wold, and has been happy with my

Lady, and that she thanks my Lady over and over again. “Out, you silly little puss!” says the ironmaster, checking her in a low voice, though not angrily; “have a spirit, if you’re fond of Wat!” My Lady merely waves her off with indifference, saying, “There, there, child. You are a good girl. Go away!” Sir Leicester has magnificently disengaged himself from the subject, and retired into the sanctuary of his blue coat. Mr Tulkinghorn, an indistinct form against the dark street now dotted with lamps, looms in my lady’s view, bigger and blacker than before.

“Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock,” says Mr Rouncewell, after a pause of a few moments, “I beg to take my leave, with an apology for having again troubled you, though not of my own act, on this tiresome subject. I can very well understand, I assure you, how tiresome so small a matter must have become to Lady Dedlock. If I am doubtful of my dealing with it, it is only because I did not at first quietly exert my influence to take my young friend here away, without troubling you at all. But it appeared to me—I dare say magnifying the importance of the thing—that it was respectful to explain to you how the matter stood, and candid to consult your wishes and convenience. I hope you will excuse my want of acquaintance with the polite world.”

Sir Leicester considers himself evoked out of the sanctuary by these remarks. “Mr Rouncewell,” he returns, “do not mention it. Justifications are unnecessary, I hope, on either side.”

“I am glad to hear it, Sir Leicester; and if I may by way of a last word, revert to what I said before of my mother’s long connection with the family, and the worth it bespeaks on both sides, I would point out this little instance here on my arm, who shows herself so affectionate and faithful in parting, and in whom my mother, I

dare say, has done something to awaken such feelings—though of course Lady Dedlock, by her heartfelt interest and her genial condescension, has done much more!”

If he means this ironically, it may be truer than he thinks. He points it, however, by no deviation from his straightforward manner of speech, though in saying it he turns towards that part of the dim room where my Lady sits. Sir Leicester stands to return his parting salutation, Mr Tulkinghorn again rings. Mercury takes another flight, and Mr Rouncewell and Rosa leave the house.

Then lights are brought in, discovering Mr Tulkinghorn still standing in his window with his hands behind him, and my Lady still sitting with his figure before her, closing up her view of the night as well as of the day. She is very pale. Mr Tulkinghorn observing it as she rises to retire, thinks, “Well she may be! The power of this woman is astonishing. She has been acting a part the whole time.” But he can act a part too—his one unchanging character—and as he holds the door open for this woman, fifty pairs of eyes, each fifty times sharper than Sir Leicester’s pair, should find no flaw in him.

Lady Dedlock dines alone in her own room today. Sir Leicester is whipped in to the rescue of the Doodle Party, and the discomfiture of the Coodle Faction. Lady Dedlock asks, on sitting down to dinner, still deadly pale (and quite an illustration of the debilitated cousin’s text), whether he is gone out? Yes. Whether Mr Tulkinghorn is gone yet? No. Presently she asks again, is he gone yet? No. What is he doing? Mercury thinks he is writing letters in the library. Would my Lady wish to see him? Anything but that.

But he wishes to see my Lady. Within a few more minutes he is

reported as sending his respects, and could my Lady please to receive him for a word or two after her dinner? My Lady will receive him now. He comes now, apologising for intruding, even by her permission, while she is at table. When they are alone, my Lady waves her hand to dispense with such mockeries.

“What do you want, sir?”

“Why, Lady Dedlock,” says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little distance from her, and slowly rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up and down, up and down; “I am rather surprised by the course you have taken.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, decidedly. I was not prepared for it. I consider it a departure from our agreement and your promise. It puts us in a new position, Lady Dedlock. I feel myself under the necessity of saying that I don’t approve of it.”

He stops in his rubbing, and looks at her, with his hands on his knees. Imperturbable and unchangeable as he is, there is still an indefinable freedom in his manner, which is new, and which does not escape this woman’s observation.

“I do not quite understand you.”

“O yes you do, I think. I think you do. Come, come, Lady Dedlock, we must not fence and parry now. You know you like this girl.”

“Well, sir?”

“And you know—and I know—that you have not sent her away for the reasons you have assigned, but for the purpose of separating her as much as possible from—excuse my mentioning it as a matter of business—any reproach and exposure that impend over yourself.”

“Well, sir?”

“Well, Lady Dedlock,” returns the lawyer, crossing his legs, and nursing the uppermost knee, “I object to that, I consider that a dangerous proceeding. I know it to be unnecessary, and calculated to awaken speculation, doubt, rumour, I don’t know what, in the house. Besides, it is a violation of our agreement. You were to be exactly what you were before. Whereas, it must be evident to yourself, as it is to me, that you have been this evening very different from what you were before. Why, bless my soul, Lady Dedlock, transparently so!”

“If, sir,” she begins, “in my knowledge of my secret—” But he interrupts her.

“Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a matter of business, and in a matter of business the ground cannot be kept too clear. It is no longer your secret. Excuse me. That is just the mistake. It is my secret, in trust for Sir Leicester and the family. If it were your secret, Lady Dedlock, we should not be here, holding this conversation.”

“That is very true. If, in my knowledge of the secret, I do what I can to spare an innocent girl (especially, remembering your own reference to her when you told my story to the assembled guests at Chesney Wold) from the taint of my impending shame, I act upon a resolution I have taken. Nothing in the world, and no one in the world, could shake it, or could move me.” This she says with great deliberation and distinctness, and with no more outward passion than himself. As for him, he methodically discusses his matter of business, as if she were any insensible instrument used in business.

“Really? Then you see, Lady Dedlock,” he returns, “you are not

to be trusted. You have put the case in a perfectly plain way, and according to the literal fact; and, that being the case, you are not to be trusted.”

“Perhaps you may remember that I expressed some anxiety on this same point, when we spoke at night at Chesney Wold?”

“Yes,” says Mr Tulkinghorn, coolly getting up and standing on the hearth. “Yes. I recollect, Lady Dedlock, that you certainly referred to the girl; but that was before we came to our arrangement, and both the letter and the spirit of our arrangement altogether precluded any action on your part, founded upon my discovery. There can be no doubt about that. As to sparing the girl, of what importance or value is she? Spare! Lady Dedlock, here is a family name compromised. One might have supposed that the course was straight on—over everything, neither to the right nor to the left, regardless of all considerations in the way, sparing nothing, treading everything under foot.”

She has been looking at the table. She lifts up her eyes, and looks at him. There is a stern expression on her face, and a part of her lower lip is compressed under her teeth. “This woman understands me,” Mr Tulkinghorn thinks, as she lets her glance fall again. “She cannot be spared. Why should she spare others?”

For a little while they are silent. Lady Dedlock has eaten no dinner, but has twice or thrice poured out water with a steady hand and drunk it. She rises from table, takes a lounging-chair, and reclines in it, shading her face. There is nothing in her manner to express weakness or excite compassion. It is thoughtful, gloomy, concentrated. “This woman,” thinks Mr Tulkinghorn, standing on the hearth, again a dark object closing up her view, is a “study.”

He studies her at his leisure, not speaking for a time. She, too, studies something at her leisure. She is not the first to speak; appearing indeed so unlikely to be so, though he stood there until midnight, that even he is driven upon breaking silence.

“Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business interview remains; but it is business. Our agreement is broken. A lady of your sense and strength of character will be prepared for my now declaring it void, and taking my own course.”

“I am quite prepared.”

Mr Tulkinghorn inclines his head. “That is all I have to trouble you with, Lady Dedlock.”

She stops him as he is moving out of the room, by asking, “This is the notice I was to receive? I wish not to misapprehend you.”

“Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock, because the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been observed. But virtually the same, virtually the same. The difference is merely in a lawyer’s mind.”

“You intend to give me no other notice?” “You are right. No.”

“Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester tonight?”

“A home question!” says Mr Tulkinghorn, with a slight smile, and cautiously shaking his head at the shaded face. “No, not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“All things considered, I had better decline answering that question, Lady Dedlock. If I were to say. If I were to say I don’t know when, exactly, you would not believe me, and it would answer no purpose. It may be tomorrow. I would rather say no more. You are prepared, and I hold out no expectations which

circumstances might fail to justify. I wish you good evening.”

She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him as he walks silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to open it.

“Do you intend to remain in the house any time? I heard you were writing in the library. Are you going to return there?”

“Only for my hat. I am going home.”

She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight and curious; and he withdraws. Clear of the room he looks at his watch, but is inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts. There is a splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid clocks not often are, for its accuracy. “And what do you say? Mr Tulkinghorn inquires, referring to it. “What do you say?”

If it said now, “Don’t go home!” What a famous clock, hereafter, if it said tonight of all the nights that it has counted off, to this old man of all the young and old men who have ever stood before it,. “Don’t go home!” With its sharp clear bell it strikes three-quarters after seven, and ticks on again. “Why, you are worse than I thought you,” says Mr Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his watch. “Two minutes wrong? At this rate you won’t last my time.” What a watch to return good for evil, if it ticked in answer “Don’t go home!”

He passes out into the streets, and walks on, with his hands behind him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose mysteries, difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are treasured up within his old black satin waistcoat. He is in the confidence of the very bricks and mortar. The high chimney- stacks telegraphed family secrets to him. Yet there is not a voice in a mile of them to whisper “Don’t go home!”

Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, and the crowd pressing him on; he is pitilessly urged upon his way, and nothing meets him, murmuring “Don’t go home!” Arrived at last in his dull room, to light his candles, and look round and up, and see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new significance in the Roman’s hand tonight, or in the flutter of the attendant groups to give him the late warning, “Don’t come here!”

It is a moonlight night; but the moon, being past the full, is only now rising over the great wilderness of London. The stars are shining as they shone above the turret-leads at Chesney Wold. This woman, as he has of late been so accustomed to call her, looks out upon them. Her soul is turbulent within her; she is sick at heart and restless. The large rooms are too cramped and close. She cannot endure their restraint, and will walk alone in a neighbouring garden.

Too capricious and imperious in all she does, to be the cause of much surprise in those about her as to anything she does, this woman, loosely muffled, goes out into the moonlight. Mercury attends with the key. Having opened the garden gate, he delivers the key into his Lady’s hand at her request, and is bidden to go back. She will walk there some time, to ease her aching head. She may be an hour; she may be more. She needs no further escort. The gate shuts upon its spring with a clash, and, he leaves her passing on into the dark shade of some trees.

A fine night, and a bright large moon, and multitudes of stars. Mr Tulkinghorn, in repairing to his cellar, and in opening and

shutting those resounding doors, has to cross a little prison-like yard. He looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large moon, what multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too.

A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her, that influence even crowded places full of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky, with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in corn- field, windmill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever- heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this stranger’s wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers, and its one great dome, grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness, in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr Tulkinghorn’s inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop,

and keep their sheep in the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.

What’s that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?

The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them. Some windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look. It was a loud report, and echoed and rattled heavily. It shook one house, or so a man says who was passing. It has aroused all the dogs in the neighbourhood, who bark vehemently. Terrified cats scamper across the road. While the dogs are yet barking and howling—there is one dog howling like a demon—the church- clocks, as if they were startled too, begin to strike. The hum from the streets, likewise, seems to swell into a shout. But it is soon over. Before the last clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull. When it has ceased, the fine night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are left at peace again.

Has Mr Tulkinghorn been disturbed? His windows are dark and quiet, and his door is shut. It must be something unusual indeed, to bring him out of his shell. Nothing is heard of him, nothing is seen of him. What power of cannon might it take to shake that rusty old man out of his immoveable composure?

For many years, the persistent Roman has been pointing with no particular meaning from that ceiling. It is not likely that he has any new meaning in him tonight. Once pointing, always pointing— like any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea. There he is, no doubt, in his impossible attitude, pointing, unavailingly, all night long. Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, day. There he is still, eagerly pointing, and no one minds him.

But, a little after the coming of the day, come people to clean the rooms, And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild; for, looking up at his outstretched hand, and looking down at what is below it, that person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first one looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street.

What does it mean? No light is admitted into the darkened chamber, and people unaccustomed to it, enter, and treading softly, but heavily, carry a weight into the bedroom, and lay it down. There is whispering and wondering all day, strict search of every corner, careful tracing of steps, and careful noting of the disposition of every article of furniture. All eyes look up at the Roman, and all voices murmur, “If he could only tell what he saw!”

He is pointing at a table, with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a glass upon it, and two candles that were blown out suddenly, soon after being lighted. He is pointing at an empty chair, and at a stain upon the ground before it that might be almost covered with a hand. These objects lie directly within his range. An excited imagination might suppose that there was something in them so terrific, as to drive the rest of the composition, not only the attendant big-legged boys, but the clouds and flowers and pillars too—in short, the very body and soul of Allegory, and all the brains it has—stark mad. It happens surely, that every one who comes into the darkened room and looks at these things, looks up at the Roman, and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were a paralysed dumb witness.

So, it shall happen surely, through many years to come, that

ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be covered, so hard to be got out; and that the Roman, pointing from the ceiling, shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare him, with far greater significance than he ever had in Mr Tulkinghorn’s time, and with a deadly meaning. For, Mr Tulkinghorn’s time is over for evermore; and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.

Chapter 49

Dutiful Friendship

great annual occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr Joseph Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present bassoon-player. An

occasion of feasting and festival. The celebration of a birthday in the family.

It is not Mr Bagnet’s birthday. Mr Bagnet merely distinguishes that epoch in the musical instrument business, by kissing the children with an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor old mother is thinking about it,—a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this life twenty years. Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother’s name. Mr Bagnet is one of these. Perhaps his excited appreciation of the merits of the old girl, causes him usually to make the noun-substantive, Goodness, of the feminine gender.

It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely overleap the bounds of happy returns and a pudding. On young Woolwich’s last birthday, Mr Bagnet certainly did, after observing upon his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine him in the catechism; accomplishing with extreme accuracy the

questions number one and two, What is your name? and who gave you that name? but there failing in the exact precision of his memory, and substituting for number three, the question And how do you like that name? which he propounded with a sense of its importance, in itself so edifying and improving, as to give it quite an orthodox air. This, however, was a specialty on that particular birthday, and not a generic solemnity.

It is the old girl’s birthday; and that is the greatest holiday and reddest-letter day in Mr Bagnet’s calendar. The auspicious event is always commemorated according to certain forms, settled and prescribed by Mr Bagnet some years since. Mr Bagnet being deeply convinced that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to attain the highest pitch of imperial luxury, invariably goes forth himself very early in the morning of this day to buy a pair; he is, as invariably taken in by the vendor, and installed in the possession of the oldest inhabitants of any coop in Europe. Returning with these triumphs of toughness tied up in a clean blue and white cotton handkerchief (essential to the arrangements), he in a casual manner invites Mrs Bagnet to declare at breakfast what she would like for dinner. Mrs Bagnet, by a coincidence never known to fail, replying Fowls, Mr Bagnet instantly produces his bundle from a place of concealment, amidst general amazement and rejoicing. He further requires that the old girl shall do nothing all day long, but sit in her very best gown, and be served by himself and the young people. As he is not illustrious for his cookery, this may be supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment on the old girl’s part; but she keeps her state with all imaginable cheerfulness.

On this present birthday, Mr Bagnet has accomplished the

usual preliminaries. He has bought two specimens of poultry which, if there be any truth in adages, were certainly not caught with chaff, to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed and rejoiced the family by their unlooked-for production; he is himself directing the roasting of the poultry; and Mrs Bagnet, with her wholesome brown fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown of ceremony, an honoured guest.

Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner, while Woolwich, serving as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls revolving. To these young scullions Mrs Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink, or a shake of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes.

“At half-after one.” Says Mr Bagnet. “To the minute. They’ll be done.”

Mrs Bagnet, with anguish, beholds one of them at a stand-still before the fire, and beginning to burn.

“You shall have a dinner, old girl,” says Mr Bagnet. “Fit for a queen.”

Mrs Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the perception of her son betrays so much uneasiness of spirit, that he is impelled by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, what is the matter?—thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more oblivious of the fowls than before, and not affording the least hope of a return to consciousness. Fortunately, his elder sister perceives the cause of the agitation in Mrs Bagnet’s breast, and with an admonitory poke recalls him. The stopped fowls going round again, Mrs Bagnet closes her eyes, in the intensity of her relief.

“George will look us up,” says Mr Bagnet. “At half-after four. To the moment. How many years, old girl. Has George looked us up.

This afternoon?”

“Ah, Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I begin to think. Just about that, and no less,” returns Mrs Bagnet, laughing and shaking her head.

“Old girl,” says Mr Bagnet. “Never mind. You’d be as young as ever you was. If you wasn’t younger. Which you are. As everybody knows.”

Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what it will be.

“Do you know, Lignum,” says Mrs Bagnet, casting a glance on the tablecloth, and winking “salt!” at Malta with her right eye, and shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head; “I begin to think George is in the roving way again.”

“George,” returns Mr Bagnet, “will never desert. And leave his old comrade. In the lurch. Don’t be afraid of it.”

“No, Lignum. No. I don’t say he will. I don’t think he will. But if he could get over his money-trouble of his, I believe he would be off.”

Mr Bagnet asks why?

“Well,” returns his wife, considering. “George seems to me to be getting not a little impatient and restless. I don’t say but what he’s as free as ever. Of course he must be free, or he wouldn’t be George; but he smarts, and seems put out.”

“He’s extra-drilled,” says Mr Bagnet. “By a lawyer. Who would put the devil out.”

“There’s something in that,” his wife assents; “but so it is, Lignum.”

Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the

necessity under which Mr Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force of his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made-gravy acquiring no flavour, and turning out of a flaxen complexion. With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes. The legs of the fowls, too, are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly. Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr Bagnet at last dishes, and they sit down at table; Mrs Bagnet occupying the guest’s place at his right hand.

It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious. Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that it is in the nature of poultry to possess, is developed in these specimens in the singular form of guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their legs are so hard, as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises, and the walking of matches. But Mr Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment’s disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drumsticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand.

The old girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of the repast, in sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth

swept, and the dinner-service washed up and polished in the back yard. The great delight and energy with which the two young ladies apply themselves to these duties, turning up their skirts in imitation of their mother, and skating in and out on little scaffolds of pattens, inspire the highest hopes for the future, but some anxiety for the present. The same causes lead to a confusion of tongues, a clattering of crockery, a rattling of tin mugs, a whisking of brooms, and an expenditure of water, all in excess; while the saturation of the young ladies themselves is almost too moving a spectacle for Mrs Bagnet to look upon, with the calmness proper to her position. At last the various cleansing processes are triumphantly completed; Quebec and Malta appear in fresh attire, smiling and dry; pipes, tobacco, and something to drink, are placed upon the table; and the old girl enjoys the first peace of mind she ever knows on the day of this delightful entertainment.

When Mr Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of the clock are very near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr Bagnet announces, “George! Military time.”

It is George; and he has hearty congratulations for the old girl (whom he kisses on the great occasion), and for the children, and for Mr Bagnet. “Happy returns to all!” says Mr George.

“But, George, old man?” cries Mrs Bagnet, looking at him curiously. “What’s come to you?”

“Come to me?”

“Ah! you are so white, George—for you—and look so shocked.

Now, don’t he, Lignum?”

“George,” says Mr Bagnet, “tell the old girl. What’s the matter.” “I didn’t know I looked white,” says the trooper, passing his hand over his brow, “and I didn’t know I looked shocked, and I’m

sorry I do. But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over.”

“Poor creetur!” says Mrs Bagnet, with a mother’s pity. “Is he gone? Dear, dear!”

“I didn’t mean to say anything about it, for it’s not birthday talk, but you have got it out of me, you see, before I sit down. I should have roused up in a minute,” says the trooper, making himself speak more gaily, “but you’re so quick, Mrs Bagnet.”

“You’re right. The old girl,” says Mr Bagnet. “Is as quick. As powder.”

“And what’s more, she’s the subject of the day, and we’ll stick to her,” cries Mr George. “See here, I have brought a little brooch along with me. It’s a poor thing, you know, but it’s a keepsake. That’s all the good it is, Mrs Bagnet.”

Mr George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring leapings and clappings by the young family, and with a species of reverential admiration by Mr Bagnet. “Old girl,” says Mr Bagnet. “Tell him my opinion of it.”

“Why, it’s a wonder, George!” Mrs Bagnet exclaims. “It’s the beautifullest thing that ever was seen!”

“Good!” says Mr Bagnet. “My opinion.”

“It’s so pretty, George,” cries Mrs Bagnet, turning it on all sides, and holding it out at arm’s length, “that it seems too choice for me.”

“Bad!” says Mr Bagnet. “Not my opinion.”

“But whatever it is, a hundred thousand thanks, old fellow,” says Mrs Bagnet, her eyes sparkling with pleasure, and her hand stretched out to him; “and though I have been a cross-grained soldier’s wife to you sometimes, George, we are as strong friends, I

am sure, in reality, as ever can be. Now you shall fasten it on yourself, for good luck, if you will, George.”

The children close up to see it done, and Mr Bagnet looks over young Woolwich’s head to see it done, with an interest so maturely wooden, yet so pleasantly childish, that Mrs Bagnet cannot help laughing in her airy way, and saying, “O, Lignum, Lignum, what a precious old chap you are!” But the trooper fails to fasten the brooch. His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. “Would any one believe this?” says he, catching it as it drops, and looking round. “I am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like this!”

Mrs Bagnet concludes that for such a case there is no remedy like a pipe; and fastening the brooch herself in a twinkling, causes the trooper to be inducted into his usual snug place, and the pipes to be got into action. “If that don’t bring you round, George,” says she, “just throw your eye across here at your present now and then, and the two together must do it.”

“You ought to do it of yourself,” George answers; “I know that very well, Mrs Bagnet. I’ll tell you how, one way and another, the blues have got to be too many for me. Here was this poor lad. ’Twas dull work to see him dying as he did, and not be able to help him.”

“What do you mean, George? You did help him. You took him under your roof.”

“I helped him so far, but that’s little. I mean, Mrs Bagnet, there he was, dying without ever having been taught much more than to know his right hand from his left. And he was too far gone to be helped out of that.”

“Ah, poor creetur!” says Mrs Bagnet.

“Then,” says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and passing

his heavy hand over his hair, “that brought up Gridley in a man’s mind. His was a bad case too, in a different way. Then the two got mixed up in a man’s mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do with both. And to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, standing up on end in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking everything so evenly—it made flesh and blood tingle, I do assure you.”

“My advice to you,” returns Mrs Bagnet, “is to light your pipe, and tingle that way. It’s wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for the health altogether.”

“You’re right,” says the trooper, “and I’ll do it!”

So, he does it: though still with an indignant gravity that impresses the young Bagnets, and even causes Mr Bagnet to defer the ceremony of drinking Mrs Bagnet’s health; always given by himself, on these occasions, in a speech of exemplary terseness. But the young ladies having composed what Mr Bagnet is in the habit of calling “the mixtur,” and George’s pipe being now in a glow, Mr Bagnet considers it his duty to proceed to the toast of the evening. He addresses the assembled company in the following terms.

“George. Woolwich. Quebec. Malta. This is her birthday. Take a day’s march. And you won’t find such another. Here’s towards her!”

The toast having been drunk with enthusiasm, Mrs Bagnet returns thanks in a neat address of corresponding brevity. This model composition is limited to the three words “And wishing yours!” which the old girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession, and a well-regulated swig of the mixture. This she again follows up, on the present occasion, by the wholly

unexpected exclamation, “Here’s a man!”

Here is a man, much to the astonishment of the little company, looking in at the parlour door. He is a sharp-eyed man—a quick keen man—and he takes in everybody’s look at him, all at once, individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a remarkable man.

“George,” says the man, nodding, “how do you find yourself?” “Why, it’s Bucket!” cries Mr George.

“Yes,” says the man, coming in and closing the door. “I was going down the street here, when I happened to stop and look in at the musical instruments in the shop window—a friend of mine is in wants of a second-hand wiolinceller, of a good tone—and I saw a party enjoying themselves, and I thought it was you in the corner; I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. How goes the world with you, George, at the present moment? Pretty smooth? And with you, ma’am? And with you, governor? And Lord!” says Mr Bucket, opening his arms, “here’s children too! You may do anything with me, if you only show me children. Give us a kiss, my pets. No occasion to inquire who your father and mother is. Never saw such a likeness in my life!”

Mr Bucket, not unwelcome, has sat himself down next to Mr George, and taken Quebec and Malta on his knees. “You pretty dears,” says Mr Bucket, “give us another kiss; it’s the only thing I’m greedy in. Lord bless you, how healthy you look! And what may be the ages of these two, ma’am? I should put ’em down at the figures of about eight and ten.”

“You’re very near, sir,” says Mrs Bagnet. “I generally am near,” returns Mr Bucket, “being so fond of children. A friend of mine has had nineteen of ’em, ma’am, all by one mother, and she’s still

as fresh and rosy as the morning. Not so much so as yourself, but, upon my soul, she comes near you! And what do you call these, my darling?” pursues Mr Bucket, pinching Malta’s cheek. “These are peaches, these are. Bless your heart! And what do you think about father? Do you think father could recommend a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone for Mr Bucket’s friend, my dear? My name’s Bucket. Ain’t that a funny name?”

These blandishments have entirely won the family heart. Mrs Bagnet forgets the day to the extent of filling a pipe and a glass for Mr Bucket, and waiting upon him hospitably. She would be glad to receive so pleasant a character under any circumstances, but she tells him that as a friend of George’s she is particularly glad to see him this evening, for George has not been in his usual spirits.

“Not in his usual spirits?” exclaims Mr Bucket. “Why, I never heard of such a thing! What’s the matter, George? You don’t intend to tell me you’ve been out of spirits. What should you be out of spirits for? You haven’t got anything on your mind, you know?”

“Nothing particular,” returns the trooper.

“I should think not,” rejoins Mr Bucket. “What could you have on your mind, you know! And have these pets got anything on their minds, eh? Not they; but they’ll be upon the minds of some of the young fellows, some of these days, and make ’em precious low- spirited. I ain’t much of a prophet, but I can tell you that, ma’am.”

Mrs Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr Bucket has a family of his own.

“There, ma’am,” says Mr Bucket. “Would you believe it? No, I haven’t. My wife, and a lodger, constitute my family. Mrs Bucket is as fond of children as myself, and as wishful to have ’em; but no. So it is. Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not

repine. What a very nice back-yard, ma’am! Any way out of that yard, now?”

There is no way out of that yard.

“Ain’t there really?” says Mr Bucket. “I should have thought there might have been. Well, I don’t know as I ever saw a back yard that took my fancy more. Would you allow me to look at it? Thank you. No, I see there’s no way out. But what a very good- proportioned yard it is!”

Having cast his sharp eye all about it, Mr Bucket returns to his chair next his friend Mr George, and pats Mr George affectionately on the shoulder.

“How are your spirits, now, George?” “All right now,” returns the trooper.

“That’s your sort!” says Mr Bucket. “Why should you ever have been otherwise? A man of your fine figure and constitution has no right to be out of spirits. That ain’t a chest to be out of spirits, is it, ma’am? And you haven’t got anything on your mind, you know, George; what could you have on your mind!”

Somewhat harping on this phrase, considering the extent and variety of his conversational powers, Mr Bucket twice or thrice repeats it to the pipe he lights, and with a listening face that is particularly his own. But the sun of his sociality soon recovers from this brief eclipse, and shines again.

“And this is brother, is it, my dears?” says Mr Bucket, referring to Quebec and Malta for information on the subject of young Woolwich. “And a nice brother he is—half brother I mean to say. For he’s too old to be your boy, ma’am.”

“I can certify at all events, that he is not anybody else’s,” returns Mrs Bagnet, laughing.

“Well, you do surprise me! Yet he’s like you, there’s no denying. Lord, he’s wonderfully like you! But about what you may call the brow, you know, there his father comes out!” Mr Bucket compares the faces with one eye shut up, while Mr Bagnet smokes in stolid satisfaction.

This is an opportunity for Mrs Bagnet to inform him, that the boy is George’s godson.

“George’s godson, is he?” rejoins Mr Bucket, with extreme cordiality. I must shake hands over again with George’s godson. Godfather and godson do credit to one another. And what do you intend to make of him, ma’am? Does he show any turn for any musical instrument?”

Mr Bagnet suddenly interposes, “Plays the Fife. Beautiful.” “Would you believe it, governor,” says Mr Bucket, struck by the

coincidence, “that when I was a boy I played the fife myself? Not in a scientific way, as I expect he does, but by ear. Lord bless you! British Grenadiers—there’s a tune to warm an Englishman up? Could you give us British Grenadiers, my fine fellow?”

Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this call upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and performs the stirring melody: during which performance Mr Bucket, much enlivened, beats time, and never fails to come in sharp with the burden, “Brit Ish Gra-a-anadeers!” In short, he shows so much musical taste, that Mr Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips to express his conviction that he is a singer. Mr Bucket receives the harmonious impeachment so modestly: confessing how that he did once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own bosom, and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends: that he is asked to sing. Not to be

behindhand in the sociality of the evening, he complies, and gives them “Believe me if all those endearing young charms.” This ballad, he informs Mrs Bagnet, he considers to have been his most powerful ally in moving the heart of Mrs Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the altar—Mr Bucket’s own words are, to come up to the scratch.

This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the evening, that Mr George, who testified no great emotions of pleasure on his entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather proud of him. He is so friendly, is a man of so many resources, and so easy to get on with, that it is something to have made him known there. Mr Bagnet becomes, after another pipe, so sensible of the value of his acquaintance, that he solicits the honour of his company on the old girl’s next birthday. If anything can more closely cement and consolidate the esteem which Mr Bucket has formed for the family, it is the discovery of the nature of the occasion. He drinks to Mrs Bagnet with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-book with a girdle to it, and breathes a hope that Mrs Bucket and Mrs Bagnet may before then become, in a manner, sisters. As he says himself, what is public life without private ties? He is in his humble way a public man, but it is not in that sphere that he finds happiness. No, it must be sought within the confines of domestic bliss.

It is natural, under these circumstances, that he, in his turn, should remember the friend to whom he is indebted for so promising an acquaintance. And he does. He keeps very close to him. Whatever the subject of the conversation, he keeps a tender

eye upon him. He waits to walk home with him. He is interested in his very boots; and observes even them attentively, as Mr George sits smoking cross-legged in the chimney corner.

At length, Mr George rises to depart. At the same moment Mr Bucket, with the secret sympathy of friendship, also rises. He dotes upon the children to the last, and remembers the commission he has undertaken for an absent friend.

“Respecting that second-hand wiolinceller, governor—could you recommend me such a thing?”

“Scores,” says Mr Bagnet.

“I am obliged to you,” returns Mr Bucket, squeezing his hand. “You’re a friend in need. A good tone, mind you! My friend is a regular dab at it. Ecod, he saws away at Mo-zart and Handel, and the rest of the big-wigs, like a thorough workman. And you needn’t,” says Mr Bucket, in a considerate and private voice, “you needn’t commit yourself to too low a figure, governor. I don’t want to pay too large a price for my friend; but I want you to have your proper percentage, and be remunerated for your loss of time. That is but fair. Every man must live, and ought to it.”

Mr Bagnet shakes his head at the old girl, to the effect that they have found a jewel of price.

“Suppose I was to give you a look in, say at half-arter ten tomorrow morning. Perhaps you could name the figures of a few wiolincellers of a good tone?” says Mr Bucket.

Nothing easier. Mr and Mrs Bagnet both engage to have the requisite information ready, and even hint to each other at the practicability of having a small stock collected there for approval.

“Thank you,” says Mr Bucket, “thank you. Good night, ma’am. Good night, governor. Good night, darlings. I am much obliged to

you for one of the pleasantest evenings I ever spent in my life.”

They, on the contrary, are much obliged to him for the pleasure he has given them in his company; and so they part with many expressions of good-will on both sides. “Now, George, old boy,” says Mr Bucket, taking his arm at the shop door, “come along.’“ As they go down the little street, and the Bagnets pause for a minute looking after them, Mrs Bagnet remarks to the worthy Lignum that Mr Bucket “almost clings to George like, and seems to be really fond of him.”

The neighbouring streets being narrow and ill paved, it is a little inconvenient to walk there two abreast and arm in arm. Mr George therefore soon proposes to walk singly. But Mr Bucket, who cannot make up his mind to relinquish his friendly hold, replies. “Wait half a minute, George. I should wish to speak to you first.” Immediately afterwards, he twists him into a public-house and into a parlour, where he confronts him, and claps his own back against the door.

“Now, George,” says Mr Bucket. “Duty is duty, and friendship is friendship. I never want the two to clash, if I can help it. I have endeavoured to make things pleasant tonight, and I put it to you whether I have done it or not. You must consider yourself in custody, George.”

“Custody? What for?” returns the trooper, thunderstruck. “Now, George,” says Mr Bucket, urging a sensible view of the

case upon him with his fat forefinger, “duty, as you know very well, is one thing, and conversation is another. It’s my duty to inform you that any observations you may make will be liable to be used against you. Therefore, George, be careful what you say. You don’t happen to have heard of a murder!”

“Murder!”

“Now, George,” says Mr Bucket, keeping his forefinger in an impressive state of action, “bear in mind what I’ve said to you. I ask you nothing. You’ve been in low spirits this afternoon. I say, you don’t happen to have heard of a murder.”

“No. Where has there been a murder?”

“Now, George,” says Mr Bucket, “don’t you go and commit yourself. I’m a-going to tell you what I want you for. There has been a murder in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—gentleman of the name of Tulkinghorn. He was shot last night. I want you for that.”

The trooper sinks upon a seat behind him, and great drops start out upon his forehead, and a deadly pallor overspreads his face.

“Bucket! It’s not possible that Mr Tulkinghorn has been killed and that you suspect me?”

“George,” returns Mr Bucket, keeping his forefinger going, “it is certainly possible, because it’s the case. This deed was done last night at ten o’clock. Now, you know where you were last night at ten o’clock, and you’ll be able to prove it no doubt.”

“Last night! Last night?” repeats the trooper, thoughtfully. Then it flashes upon him. “Why, great Heaven, I was there last night!”

“So I have understood, George,” returns Mr Bucket, with great deliberation. “So I have understood. Likewise you’ve been very often there. You’ve been seen hanging about the place, and you’ve been heard more than once in a wrangle with him, and it’s possible—I don’t say it’s certainly so, mind you, but it’s possible— that he may have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, dangerous fellow.”

The trooper gasps as if he would admit it all, if he could speak.

“Now, George,” continues Mr Bucket, putting his hat upon the table, with an air of business rather in the upholstery way than otherwise, “My wish is, as it has been all the evening, to make things pleasant. I tell you plainly there’s a reward out, of a hundred guineas, offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. You and me have always been pleasant together; but I have got a duty to discharge; and if that hundred guineas is to be made, it may as well be made by me as by another man. On all of which accounts, I should hope it was clear to you that I must have you, and that I’m damned if I don’t have you. Am I to call in any assistance, or is the trick done?”

Mr George has recovered himself, and stands up like a soldier. “Come,” he says; “I am ready.”

“George,” continues Mr Bucket, “wait a bit!” With his upholsterer manner, as if the trooper were a window to be fitted up, he takes from his pocket a pair of handcuffs. “This is a serious charge, George, and such is my duty.”

The trooper flushes angrily, and hesitates a moment; but holds out his two hands, clasped together, and says, “There! Put them on!”

Mr Bucket adjusts them in a moment. “How do you find them? Are they comfortable? If not, say so, for I wish to make things as pleasant as is consistent with my duty, and I’ve got another pair in my pocket.” This remark he offers like a most respectable tradesman, anxious to execute an order neatly and to the perfect satisfaction of his customer. “They’ll do as they are? Very well! Now, you see George;” he takes a cloak from a corner, and begins adjusting it about the trooper’s neck; “I was mindful of your feelings when I come out, and brought this on purpose. There!

Who’s the wiser?”

“Only I,” returns the trooper; “but as I know it, do me one more good turn, and pull my hat over my eyes.”

“Really, though! Do you mean it? Ain’t it a pity? It looks so.”

“I can’t look chance men in the face with these things on,” Mr George hurriedly replies. “Do for God’s sake, pull my hat forward.”

So strongly entreated, Mr Bucket complies, puts his own hat on, and conducts his prize into the streets; the trooper marching on as steadily as usual, though with his head less erect; and Mr Bucket steering him with his elbow over the crossings and up the turnings.

Chapter 50

Esther’s Narrative

t happened that when I came home from Deal, I found a note from Caddy Jellyby (as we always continued to call her), informing me that her health, which had been for some time very delicate, was worse, and that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I would go to see her. It was a note of a few lines, written from the couch on which she lay, and inclosed to me in another from her husband, in which he seconded her entreaty with much solicitude. Caddy was now the mother, and I the godmother, of such a poor little baby—such a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that seemed to be scarcely anything but cap- border, and a little lean, long-fingered hand, always clenched under its chin. It would lie in this attitude all day, with its bright specks of eyes open, wondering (as I used to imagine) how it came to be so small and weak. Whenever it was moved it cried; but at all other times it was so patient, that the sole desire of its life appeared to be, to lie quiet and think. It had curious little dark veins in its face, and curious little dark marks under its eyes, like faint remembrances of poor Caddy’s inky days; and altogether, to

those who were not used to it, it was quite a piteous little sight.

But it was enough for Caddy that she was used to it. The projects with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther’s education, and little Esther’s marriage, and even for her own old age, as the grandmother of little Esther’s little Esthers, were so prettily expressive of devotion to this pride of her life, that I should

be tempted to recall some of them, but for the timely remembrance that I am getting on irregularly as it is.

To return to the letter. Caddy had a superstition about me, which had been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago, when she had lain asleep with her head in my lap. She almost—I think I must say quite—believed that I did her good whenever I was near her. Now, although this was such a fancy of the affectionate girl’s that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have all the force of a fact when she was really ill. Therefore I set off to Caddy, with my Guardian’s consent, post- haste; and she and Prince made so much of me, that there never was anything like it.

Next day I went again to sit with her, and next day I went again. It was a very easy journey; for I had only to rise a little earlier in the morning, and keep my accounts, and attend to housekeeping matters before leaving home. But when I had made these three visits, my Guardian said to me, on my return at night:

“Now, little woman, little woman, this will never do. Constant dropping will wear away a stone, and constant coaching will wear out a Dame Durden. We will go to London for a while, and take possession of our old lodgings.”

“Not for me, dear Guardian,” said I, “for I never feel tired;” which was strictly true. I was only too happy to be in such request. “For me then,” returned my Guardian; “or for Ada, or for both

of us. It is somebody’s birthday tomorrow, I think.”

“Truly I think it is,” said I, kissing my darling, who would be twenty-one tomorrow.

“Well,” observed my Guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously, “that’s a great occasion, and will give my fair cousin some

necessary business to transact in assertion of her independence, and will make London a more convenient place for all of us. So to London we will go. That being settled, there is another thing— how have you left Caddy?”

“Very unwell, Guardian. I fear it will be some time before she regains her health and strength.”

“What do you call some time, now?” asked my Guardian, thoughtfully.

“Some weeks, I am afraid.”

“Ah!” He began to walk about the room with his hands in his pockets, showing that he had been thinking as much. “Now what do you say about her doctor? Is he a good doctor, my love?”

I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the contrary; but that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like his opinion to be confirmed by some one.

“Well, you know,” returned my Guardian quickly, “there’s Woodcourt.”

I had not meant that, and was rather taken by surprise. For a moment, all that I had had in my mind in connection with Mr Woodcourt seemed to come back and confuse me.

“You don’t object to him, little woman?” “Object to him, Guardian? Oh no!”

“And you don’t think the patient would object to him?”

So far from that, I had no doubt of her being prepared to have a great reliance on him, and to like him very much. I said that he was no stranger to her personally, for she had seen him often in his kind attendance on Miss Flite.

“Very good,” said my Guardian. “He has been here today, my dear, and I will see him about it tomorrow.”

I felt, in this short conversation—though I did not know how, for she was quiet, and we interchanged no look—that my dear girl well remembered how merrily she had clasped me round the waist, when no other hands than Caddy’s had brought me the little parting token. This caused me to feel that I ought to tell her, and Caddy too, that I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House; and that if I avoided that disclosure any longer, I might become less worthy in my own eyes of its master’s love. Therefore, when we went upstairs and had waited listening until the clock struck twelve, in order that only I might be the first to wish my darling all good wishes on her birthday, and to take her to my heart, I set before her, just as I had set before myself, the goodness and honour of her cousin John, and the happy life that was in store for me. If ever my darling were fonder of me at one time than at another in all our intercourse, she was surely fondest of me that night. And I was so rejoiced to know it, and so comforted by the sense of having done right, in casting this last idle reservation away, that I was ten times happier than I had been before. I had scarcely thought it a reservation a few hours ago; but now that it was gone, I felt as if I understood its nature better.

Next day we went to London. We found our old lodging vacant, and in half an hour were quietly established there, as if we had never gone away. Mr Woodcourt dined with us, to celebrate my darling’s birthday; and we were as pleasant as we could be with the great blank among us that Richard’s absence naturally made on such an occasion. After that day I was for some weeks—eight or nine as I remember—very much with Caddy; and thus it fell out that I saw less of Ada at this time than any other since we had first come together, except the time of my own illness. She often came

to Caddy’s; but our function there was to amuse and cheer her, and we did not talk in our usual confidential manner. Whenever I went home at night, we were together; but Caddy’s rest was broken by pain, and I often remained to nurse her.

With her husband and her poor little mite of a baby to love, and her home to strive for, what a good creature Caddy was! So self- denying, so uncomplaining, so anxious to get well on their account, so afraid of giving trouble, and so thoughtful of the unassisted labours of her husband and the comforts of old Mr Turveydrop; I had never known the best of her until now. And it seemed so curious that her pale face and helpless figure should be lying there day after day, where dancing was the business of life; where the kit and the apprentices began early every morning in the ball-room, and where the untidy little boy waltzed by himself in the kitchen all the afternoon.

At Caddy’s request, I took the supreme direction of her apartment, trimmed it up, and pushed her, couch and all, into a lighter and more airy and more cheerful corner than she had yet occupied; then, every day, when we were in our neatest array, I used to lay my small small namesake in her arms, and sit down to chat or work, or read to her. It was at one of the first of these quiet times that I told Caddy about Bleak House.

We had other visitors besides Ada. First of all, we had Prince, who in his hurried intervals of teaching used to come softly in and sit softly down, with a face of loving anxiety for Caddy and the very little child. Whatever Caddy’s condition really was, she never failed to declare to Prince that she was all but well—which I, Heaven forgive me, never failed to confirm. This would put Prince in such good spirits, that he would sometimes take the kit from his

pocket and play a chord or two to astonish the baby—which I never knew it to do in the least degree, for my tiny namesake never noticed it at all.

Then there was Mrs Jellyby. She would come occasionally with her usual distraught manner, and sit calmly looking miles beyond her grandchild, as if her attention were absorbed by a young Borrioboolan on its native shores. As bright-eyed as ever, as serene, and as untidy, she would say, “Well, Caddy, child, and how do you do today?” And then would sit amiably smiling, and taking no notice of the reply; or would sweetly glide off into a calculation of the number of letters she had lately received and answered, or of the coffee-bearing power of Borrioboola-Gha. This she would always do with a serene contempt for our limited sphere of action, not to be disguised.

Then there was old Mr Turveydrop, who was from morning to night and from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions. If the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him uncomfortable. If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it was surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken. If Caddy required any little comfort that the house contained, she first carefully discussed whether he was likely to require it, too. In return for this consideration, he would come into the room once a day, all but blessing it—showing a condescension, and a patronage, and a grace of manner, in dispensing the light of his high-shouldered presence, from which I might have supposed him (if I had not known better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy’s life.

“My Caroline” he would say, making the nearest approach that he could to bending over her. “Tell me that you are better today.”

“O much better, thank you, Mr Turveydrop,” Caddy would reply.

“Delighted! Enchanted! And our dear Miss Summerson. She is not quite prostrated by fatigue?” Here he would crease up his eyelids, and kiss his fingers to me; though I am happy to say he had ceased to be particular in his attentions, since I had been so altered.

“Not at all,” I would assure him.

“Charming! We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson. We must spare nothing that will restore her. We must nourish her. My dear Caroline;” he would turn to his daughter-in-law with infinite generosity and protection; “want for nothing, my love. Frame a wish and gratify it, my daughter. Everything this house contains, everything my room contains, is at your service, my dear. Do not,” he would sometimes add, in a burst of Deportment, “even allow my simple requirements to be considered, if they should at any time interfere with your own, my Caroline. Your necessities are greater than mine.”

He had established such a long prescriptive right to this Deportment (his son’s inheritance from his mother), that I several times knew both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by these affectionate self-sacrifices.

“Nay, my dears,” he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy’s thin arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though not by the same process; “Nay, nay! I have promised never to leave ye. Be dutiful and affectionate towards me, and I ask no other return. Now, bless ye! I am going to the Park.”

He would take the air there, presently, and get an appetite for

his hotel dinner. I hope I do old Mr Turveydrop no wrong; but I never saw any better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except that he certainly conceived a liking for Peepy, and would take the child out walking with great pomp—always, on those occasions, sending him home before he went to dinner himself, and occasionally with a halfpenny in his pocket. But, even this disinterestedness was attended with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge; for before Peepy was sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with the professor of Deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the expense of Caddy and her husband, from top to toe.

Last of our visitors, there was Mr Jellyby. Really when he used to come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice how she was, and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no attempt to say anything more, I liked him very much. If he found me bustling about, doing any little thing, he sometimes half took his coat off, as if with an intention of helping by a great exertion; but he never got any further. His sole occupation was to sit with his head against the wall, looking hard at the thoughtful baby; and I could not quite divest my mind of a fancy that they understood one another.

I have not counted Mr Woodcourt among our visitors, because he was now Caddy’s regular attendant. She soon began to improve under his care; but he was so gentle, so skilful, so unwearying in the pains he took, that it is not to be wondered at, I am sure. I saw a good deal of Mr Woodcourt during this time, though not so much as might be supposed; for, knowing Caddy to be safe in his hands, I often slipped home at about the hours when he was expected. We frequently met, notwithstanding. I was quite reconciled to myself

now; but I still felt glad to think that he was sorry for me, and he still was sorry for me I believed. He helped Mr Badger in his professional engagements, which were numerous; and had as yet no settled projects for the future.

It was when Caddy began to recover, that I began to notice a change in my dear girl. I cannot say how it first presented itself to me; because I observed it in many slight particulars, which were nothing in themselves, and only became something when they were pieced together. But I made it out, by putting them together, that Ada was not so frankly cheerful with me as she used to be. Her tenderness for me was as loving and true as ever; I did not for a moment doubt that; but there was a quiet sorrow about her which she did not confide to me, and in which I traced some hidden regret.

Now I could not understand this; and I was so anxious for the happiness of my own pet, that it caused me some uneasiness, and set me thinking often. At length, feeling sure that Ada suppressed this something from me, lest it should make me unhappy too, it came into my head that she was a little grieved—for me—by what I had told her about Bleak House.

How I persuaded myself that this was likely, I don’t know. I had no idea that there was any selfish reference in my doing so. I was not grieved for myself; I was quite contented and quite happy. Still, that Ada might be thinking—for me, though I had abandoned all such thoughts—of what once was, but was now all changed, seemed so easy to believe, that I believed it.

What could I do to reassure my darling (I considered then) and show her that I had no such feelings? Well! I could only be as brisk and busy as possible; and that, I had tried to be all along.

However, as Caddy’s illness had certainly interfered, more or less, with my home duties—though I had always been there in the morning to make my Guardian’s breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed, and said there must be two little women, for his little woman was never missing—I resolved to be doubly diligent and gay. So I went about the house, humming all the tunes I knew; and I sat working and working in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning noon and night.

And still there was the same shade between me and my darling. “So, Dame Trot,” observed my Guardian shutting up his book, one night when we were all three together; “so, Woodcourt has

restored Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?”

“Yes, I said; “and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers, is to be made rich, Guardian.”

“I wish it was,” he returned, “with all my heart.” So did I too, for that matter. I said so.

“Aye! We would make him as rich as a Jew, if we knew how.

Would we not, little woman?”

I laughed as I worked, and replied that I was not sure about that, for it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there might be many who could ill spare him. As Miss Flite, and Caddy herself, and many others.

“True,” said my Guardian. “I had forgotten that. But we would agree to make him rich enough to live, I suppose? Rich enough to work with tolerable peace of mind? Rich enough to have his own happy home, and his own household gods—and household goddess too, perhaps?”

That was quite another thing, I said. We must all agree in that. “To be sure,” said my Guardian. “All of us. I have a great regard

for Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him delicately about his plans. It is difficult to offer aid to an independent man, with that just kind of pride which he possesses. And yet I would be glad to do it if I might, or if I knew how. He seems half inclined for another voyage. But that appears like casting such a man away.”

“It might open a new world to him,” said I.

“So it might little woman,” my Guardian assented. “I doubt if he expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he sometimes feels some particular disappointment, or misfortune, encountered in it. You never heard of anything of that sort?”

I shook my head.

“Humph,” said my Guardian. “I am mistaken, I dare say.”

As there was a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl’s satisfaction, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked which was a favourite with my Guardian.

“And do you think Mr Woodcourt will make another voyage?” I asked him, when I had hummed it quietly all through.

“I don’t quite know what to think, my dear, but I should say it was likely at present that he will give a long trial to another country.”

“I am sure he will take the best wishes of all our hearts with him wherever he goes,” said I; “and though they are not riches, he will never be the poorer for them, Guardian, at least.”

“Never, little woman,” he replied.

I was sitting in my usual place, which was now beside my Guardian’s chair. That had not been my usual place before the letter, but it was now. I looked up at Ada, who was sitting opposite;

and I saw, as she looked at me, that her eyes were filled with tears, and that tears were falling down her face. I felt that I had only to be placid and merry once for all to undeceive my dear, and set her loving heart at rest. I really was so, and I had nothing to do but to be myself.

So I made my sweet girl lean upon my shoulder—how little thinking what was heavy on her mind!—and I said she was not quite well, and put my arm about her, and took her upstairs. When we were in our own room, and when she might perhaps have told me what I was so unprepared to hear, I gave her no encouragement to confide in me; I never thought she stood in need of it.

“O my dear good Esther,” said Ada, “if I could only make up my mind to speak to you and my cousin John, when you are together!”

“Why, my love!” I remonstrated. “Ada? why should you not speak to us!”

Ada only dropped her head and pressed me closer to her heart. “You surely don’t forget, my beauty,” said I, smiling, “what

quiet old-fashioned people we are, and how I have settled down to be the discreetest of dames? You don’t forget how happily and peacefully my life is all marked out for me, and by whom? I am certain that you don’t forget by what a noble character, Ada. That can never be.”

“No, never, Esther.”

“Why, then, my dear,” said I, “there can be nothing amiss—and why should you not speak to us!”

“Nothing amiss, Esther?” returned Ada. “O when I think of all these years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old

relations among us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do!”

I looked at my child in some wonder, but I thought it better not to answer, otherwise than by cheering her; and so I turned off into many little recollections of our life together, and prevented her from saying more. When she lay down to sleep, and not before, I returned to my Guardian to say good night; and then I came back to Ada, and sat near her for a little while.

She was asleep, and I thought as I looked at her that she was a little changed. I had thought so, more than once lately. I could not decide, even looking at her while she was unconscious, how she was changed; but something in the familiar beauty of her face looked different to me. My Guardian’s old hopes of her and Richard arose sorrowfully in my mind, and I said to myself, “she has been anxious about him,” and I wondered how that love would end.

When I had come home from Caddy’s while she was ill, I had often found Ada at work, and she had always put her work away, and I had never known what it was. Some of it now lay in a drawer near her, which was not quite closed. I did not open the drawer; but I still rather wondered what the work could be, for it was evidently nothing for herself.

And I noticed as I kissed my dear, that she lay with one hand under her pillow so that it was hidden.

How much less amiable I must have been than they thought me. How much less amiable than I thought myself, to be so preoccupied with my own cheerfulness and contentment, as to think that it only rested with me to put my dear girl right, and set her mind at peace!

But I lay down, self-deceived, in that belief. And I awoke in it

next day, to find that there was still the same shade between me and my darling.

Chapter 51

Enlightened

hen Mr Woodcourt arrived in London, he went, that very same day, to Mr Vholes’s in Symond’s Inn. For he never once, from the moment when I entreated him to

be a friend to Richard, neglected or forgot his promise. He had told me that he accepted the charge as a sacred trust, and he was ever true to it in that spirit.

He found Mr Vholes in his office, and informed Mr Vholes of his agreement with Richard, that he should call there to learn his address.

“Just so, sir,” said Mr Vholes. “Mr C’s address is not a hundred miles from here, sir, Mr C’s address is not a hundred miles from here. Would you take a seat, sir.”

Mr Woodcourt thanked Mr Vholes, but he had no business with him beyond what he had mentioned.

“Just so, sir. I believe, sir,” said Mr Vholes, still quietly insisting on the seat by not giving the address, “that you have influence with Mr C. Indeed I am aware that you have.”

“I was not aware of it myself,” returned Mr Woodcourt; “but I suppose you know best.”

“Sir,” rejoined Mr Vholes, self-contained, as usual, voice and all, “it is a part of my professional duty to know best. It is a part of my professional duty, to study and to understand a gentleman who confides his interests to me. In my professional duty I shall not be wanting, sir, if I know it. I may, with the best intentions, be

wanting in it without knowing it; but not if I know it, sir.” Mr Woodcourt again mentioned the address.

“Give me leave, sir,” said Mr Vholes. “Bear with me for a moment. Sir, Mr C is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play without—need I say what?”

“Money, I presume?”

“Sir,” said Mr Vholes, “to be honest with you (honesty being my golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I generally lose), money is the word. Now, sir, upon the chances of Mr C’s game I express to you no opinion, no opinion. It might be highly impolitic in Mr C, after playing so long and so high, to leave off; it might be the reverse. I say nothing. No, sir,” said Mr Vholes, bringing his hand flat down upon his desk, in a positive manner, “nothing.”

“You seem to forget,” returned Mr Woodcourt, “that I ask you to say nothing, and have no interest in anything you say.”

“Pardon me, sir?” retorted Mr Vholes, “you do yourself an injustice. No, sir! Pardon me! You shall not—shall not in my office, if I know it—do yourself an injustice. You are interested in anything, and in everything, that relates to your friend. I know human nature much better, sir, than to admit for an instant that a gentleman of your appearance is not interested in whatever concerns his friend.”

“Well,” replied Mr Woodcourt, “that may be. I am particularly interested in his address.”

(“The number, sir,”) said Mr Vholes, parenthetically, “(I believe I have already mentioned.) If Mr C is to continue to play for this considerable stake, sir, he must have funds. Understand me! There are funds in hand at present. I ask for nothing; there are

funds in hand. But, for the onward play, more funds must be provided; unless Mr C is to throw away what he has already ventured—which is wholly and solely a point for his consideration. This, sir, I take the opportunity of stating openly to you, as the friend of Mr C. Without funds, I shall always be happy to appear and act for Mr C, to the extent of all such costs as are safe to be allowed out of the estate: not beyond that. I could not go beyond that, sir, without wronging some one. I must either wrong my three dear girls; or my venerable father, who is entirely dependent on me—in the Vale of Taunton; or some one. Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call it weakness or folly if you please) to wrong no one.”

Mr Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear

it.

“I wish, sir,” said Mr Vholes, “to leave a good name behind me.

Therefore, I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of Mr C, how Mr C is situated. As to myself, sir, the labourer is worthy of his hire. If I undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get. I am here for that purpose. My name is painted on the door outside, with that object.”

“And Mr Carstone’s address, Mr Vholes?”

“Sir,” returned Mr Vholes, “as I believe I have already mentioned, it is next door. On the second story you will find Mr C’s apartments. Mr C desires to be near his professional adviser; and I am far from objecting, for I court inquiry.”

Upon this, Mr Woodcourt wished Mr Vholes good day, and went in search of Richard, the change in whose appearance he began to understand now but too well.

He found him in a dull room, fadedly furnished; much as I had

found him in his barrack-room but a little while before, except that he was not writing, but was sitting with a book before him, from which his eyes and thoughts were far astray. As the door chanced to be standing open, Mr Woodcourt was in his presence for some moments without being perceived; and he told me that he never could forget the haggardness of his face, and the dejection of his manner, before he was aroused from his dream.

“Woodcourt, my dear fellow!” cried Richard, starting up with extended hands, “you come upon my vision like a ghost.”

“A friendly one,” he replied, “and only waiting, as they say ghosts do, to be addressed. How does the mortal world go?” They were seated now, near together.

“Badly enough, and slowly enough,” said Richard; “speaking at least for my part of it.”

“What part is that?” “The Chancery part.”

“I never heard,” returned Mr Woodcourt, shaking his head, “of its going well yet.”

“Nor I,” said Richard, moodily. “Who ever did?”

He brightened again in a moment, and said, with his natural openness:

“Woodcourt, I should be sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by it in your estimation. You must know that I have done no good this long time. I have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have been capable of nothing else. It may be that I should have done better by keeping out of the net into which my destiny has worked me; but I think not, though I dare say you will soon hear, if you have not already heard, a very different opinion. To make short of a long story, I am afraid I have wanted

an object; but I have an object now—or it has me—and it is too late to discuss it. Take me as I am, and make the best of me.”

“A bargain,” said Mr Woodcourt. “Do as much by me in return.”

“Oh! You,” returned Richard, “you can pursue your art for its own sake; and can put your hand upon the plough, and never turn; and can strike a purpose out of anything. You, and I, are very different creatures.”

He spoke regretfully, and lapsed for a moment into his weary condition.

“Well, well!” he cried, shaking it off, “everything has an end. We shall see! So you will take me as I am, and make the best of me?”

“Ay! indeed I will.” They shook hands upon it laughingly, but in deep earnestness. I can answer, for one of them, with my heart of hearts.

“You come as a godsend,” said Richard, “for I have seen nobody here yet but Vholes. Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty. You can hardly make the best of me if I don’t. You know, I dare say, that I have an attachment to my cousin Ada?”

Mr Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much to him.

“Now pray,” returned Richard, “don’t think me a heap of selfishness. Don’t suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my heart over this miserable Chancery suit, for my own rights and interests alone. Ada’s are bound up with mine; they can’t be separated; Vholes works for both of us. Do think of that!”

He was so very solicitous on this head, that Mr Woodcourt gave him the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice.

“You see,” said Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of lingering on the point, though it was offhand and unstudied, “to an upright fellow like you, bringing a friendly face like yours here, I cannot bear the thought of appearing selfish and mean. I want to see Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I want to do my utmost to right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can scrape together to extricate her, as well as myself. Do, I beseech you, think of that!”

Afterwards, when Mr Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed, he was so very much impressed by the strength of Richard’s anxiety on this point, that in telling me generally of his first visit to Symond’s Inn, he particularly dwelt upon it. It revived a fear I had had before, that my dear girl’s little property would be absorbed by Mr Vholes, and that Richard’s justification to himself would be sincerely this. It was just as I began to take care of Caddy, that the interview took place; and I now return to the time when Caddy had recovered, and the shade was still between me and my darling.

I proposed to Ada, that morning, that we should go and see Richard. It a little surprised me to find that she hesitated, and was not so radiantly willing as I had expected.

“My dear,” said I, “you have not had any difference with Richard since I have been so much away?”

“No, Esther.”

“Not heard of him perhaps?” said I. “Yes, I have heard of him,” said Ada.

Such tears in her eyes, and such love in her face. I could not make my darling out. Should I go to Richard’s by myself, I said? No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go with

me? Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes, let us go now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her eyes and the love in her face!

We were soon equipped, and went out. It was a sombre day, and drops of chill rain fell at intervals. It was one of those colourless days when everything looks heavy and harsh. The houses frowned at us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any compromise about itself, or wore a softened aspect. I fancied my beautiful girl quite out of place in the rugged streets; and I thought there were more funerals passing along the dismal pavements, than I had ever seen before.

We had first to find out Symond’s Inn. We were going to inquire in a shop, when Ada said she thought it was near Chancery Lane. “We are not likely to be far out, my love, if we go in that direction,” said I. So to Chancery Lane we went; and there, sure enough, we saw it written up. Symond’s Inn.

We had next to find out the number. “Or Mr Vholes’s office will do,” I recollected, “for Mr Vholes’s office is next door.” Upon which Ada said, perhaps that was Mr Vholes’s office in the corner there. And it really was.

Then came the question, which of the two next doors? I was for going to the one, and my darling was for going to the other; and my darling was right again. So, up we went to the second story, where we came to Richard’s name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel.

I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn the handle and go in. Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table covered with dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty mirrors reflecting his own mind. Wherever I looked, I

saw the ominous words that ran in it, repeated. Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

He received us very affectionately, and we sat down. “If you had come a little earlier,” he said, “you would have found Woodcourt here. There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is. He finds time to look in between whiles, when anybody else with half his work to do would be thinking about not being able to come. And he is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so— everything that I am not, that the place brightens whenever he comes, and darkens whenever he goes again.”

“God bless him,” I thought, “for his truth to me!”

“He is not so sanguine, Ada,” continued Richard, casting his dejected look over the bundles of papers, “as Vholes and I are usually; but he is only an outsider, and is not in the mysteries. We have gone into them, and he has not. He can’t be expected to know much of such a labyrinth.”

As his look wandered over the papers again, and he passed his two hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his fingernails were all bitten away.

“Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?” said I. “Why, my dear Minerva,” answered Richard, with his old gay laugh, “it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun shines here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining brightly in an open spot. But it’s well enough for the time. It’s near

the offices, and near Vholes.”

“Perhaps,” I hinted, “a change from both—”

“—Might do me good?” said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished the sentence. “I shouldn’t wonder! But it can only come

in one way now—in one of two ways, I should rather say. Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor. But it shall be the suit, the suit, my dear girl!”

These latter words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest to him. Her face being turned away from me and towards him, I could not see it.

“We are doing very well,” pursued Richard. “Vholes will tell you so. We are really spinning along. Ask Vholes. We are giving them no rest. Vholes knows all their windings and turnings, and we are upon them everywhere. We have astonished them already. We shall rouse up that nest of sleepers, mark my words!”

His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable, that it had long touched me to the heart. But the commentary upon it now indelibly written in his handsome face, made it far more distressing than it used to be. I say indelibly; for I felt persuaded that if the fatal cause could have been for ever terminated, according to his brightest visions, in that same hour, the traces of the premature anxiety, self-reproach, and disappointment it had occasioned him, would have remained upon his features to the hour of his death.

“The sight of our dear little woman,” said Richard: Ada still remaining silent and quiet: “is so natural to me, and her compassionate face is so like the face of old days—”

Ah! No, no. I smiled and shook my head.

“—So exactly like the face of old days,” said Richard in his cordial voice, and taking my hand with the brotherly regard which

nothing ever changed, “that I can’t make pretences with her. I fluctuate a little; that’s the truth. Sometimes I hope, my dear, and sometimes I—don’t quite despair, but nearly. I get,” said Richard, relinquishing my hand gently, and walking across the room, “so tired!”

He took a few turns up and down, and sunk upon the sofa. “I get,” he repeated gloomily, “so tired. It is such weary, weary work!”

He was leaning on his arm, saying these words in a meditative voice, and looking at the ground, when my darling rose, put off her bonnet, kneeled down beside him with her golden hair falling like sunlight on his head, clasped her two arms round his neck, and turned her face to me. O, what a loving and devoted face I saw!

“Esther, dear,” she said very quietly, “I am not going home again.

A light shone in upon me all at once.

“Never any more. I am going to stay with my dear husband. We have been married above two months. Go home without me, my own Esther; I shall never go home any more!” With those words my darling drew his head down on her breast, and held it there. And if ever in my life I saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it then before me.

“Speak to Esther, my dearest,” said Richard, breaking the silence presently. “Tell her how it was.”

I met her before she could come to me, and folded her in my arms. We neither of us spoke; but with her cheek against my own, I wanted to hear nothing. “My pet,” said I. “My love. My poor, poor girl!” I pitied her so much. I was very fond of Richard, but the impulse that I had upon me was to pity her so much.

“Esther, will you forgive me? Will my cousin John forgive me?” “My dear,” said I, “to doubt it for a moment, is to do him a great

wrong. And as to me!”—why, as to me, what had I to forgive!

I dried my sobbing darling’s eyes, and sat beside her on the sofa, and Richard sat on my other side; and while I was reminded of that so different night when they had first taken me into their confidence, and had gone on in their own wild happy way, they told me between them how it was.

“All I had, was Richard’s,” Ada said; “and Richard would not take it, Esther, and what could I do but be his wife when I loved him dearly!”

“And you were so fully and so kindly occupied, excellent Dame Durden,” said Richard, “that how could we speak to you at such a time! And besides, it was not a long-considered step. We went out one morning and were married.”

“And when it was done, Esther,” said my darling, “I was always thinking how to tell you, and what to do for the best. And sometimes I thought you ought to know it directly; and sometimes I thought you ought not to know it and keep it from my cousin John; and I could not tell what to do, and I fretted very much.”

How selfish I must have been, not to have thought of this before! I don’t know what I said now. I was so sorry, and yet I was so fond of them, and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so much, and yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another. I never had experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one time; and in my own heart I did not know which predominated. But I was not there to darken their way; I did not do that.

When I was less foolish and more composed, my darling took

her wedding ring from her bosom, and kissed it and put it on. Then I remembered last night, and told Richard that ever since her marriage she had worn it at night when there was no one to see. Then Ada blushingly asked me how did I know that, my dear? Then I told Ada how I had seen her hand concealed under her pillow, and had little thought why, my dear. Then they began telling me how it was, all over again; and I began to be sorry and glad again, and foolish again, and to hide my plain old face as much as I could, lest I should put them out of heart.

Thus the time went on, until it became necessary for me to think of returning. When that time arrived it was the worst of all, for then my darling completely broke down. She clung round my neck, calling me by every dear name she could think of, and saying what should she do without me! Nor was Richard much better; and as for me I should have been the worst of the three, if I had not severely said to myself, “Now, Esther, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again!”

“Why, I declare,” said I, “I never saw such a wife. I don’t think she loves her husband at all. Here, Richard, take my child, for goodness’ sake.” But I held her tight all the while, and could have wept over her I don’t know how long.

“I give this dear young couple notice,” said I, “that I am only going away to come back tomorrow; and that I shall be always coming backwards and forwards, until Symond’s Inn is tired of the sight of me. So I shall not say good-bye, Richard. For what would be the use of that, you know, when I am coming back so soon!”

I had given my darling to him now, and I meant to go; but I lingered for one more look of the precious face, which it seemed to rive my heart to turn from.

So I said (in a merry bustling manner) that unless they gave me some encouragement to come back, I was not sure that I could take that liberty; upon which my dear girl looked up, faintly smiling through her tears, and I folded her lovely face between my hands, and gave it one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away.

And when I got downstairs, O how I cried! It almost seemed to me that I had lost my Ada for ever. I was so lonely and so blank without her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope of seeing her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while, as I walked up and down in a dim corner, sobbing and crying.

I came to myself by-and-by, after a little scolding, and took a coach home. The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had reappeared a short time before, and was lying at the point of death; indeed, was then dead, though I did not know it. My Guardian had gone out to inquire about him, and did not return to dinner. Being quite alone, I cried a little again; though, on the whole, I don’t think I behaved so very, very ill.

It was only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the loss of my darling yet. Three or four hours were not a long time after years. But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene in which I had left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her, and taking some sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening, only to look up at her windows.

It was foolish, I dare say; but it did not then seem at all so to me, and it does not seem quite so even now. I took Charley into my confidence, and we went out at dusk. It was dark when we came to the new strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind the yellow blinds. We walked past cautiously three or four

times, looking up; and narrowly missed encountering Mr Vholes, who came out of his office while we were there, and turned his head to look up too, before going home. The sight of his lank black figure, and the lonesome air of that nook in the dark, were favourable to the state of my mind. I thought of the youth and love and beauty of my dear girl, shut up in such an ill-assorted refuge, almost as if it were a cruel place.

It was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might safely steal upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the way. I listened for a few moments; and in the musty rotting silence of the house, believed that I could hear the murmur of their young voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door, as a kiss for my dear, and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these days I would confess to the visit.

And it really did me good; for, though nobody but Charley and I knew anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the separation between Ada and me, and had brought us together again for those moments. I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling.

My Guardian had come home, and was standing thoughtfully by the dark window. When I went in, his face cleared and he came to his seat; but he caught the light upon my face as I took mine.

“Little woman,” said he. “You have been crying.”

“Why, yes, Guardian,” said I, “I am afraid I have been a little.

Ada has been in such distress, and is so very sorry, Guardian.”

I put my arm on the back of his chair; and I saw in his glance that my words, and my look at her empty place, had prepared him.

“Is she married, my dear?”

I told him all about it, and how her first entreaties had referred to his forgiveness.

“She has no need of it,” said he. “Heaven bless her and her husband!” But just as my first impulse had been to pity her, so was his. “Poor girl, poor girl! Poor Rick! Poor Ada!”

Neither of us spoke after that; until he said with a sigh, “Well, well, my dear! Bleak House is thinning fast.”

“But its mistress remains, Guardian.” Though I was timid about saying it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone in which he had spoken. “She will do all she can to make him happy,” said I.

“She will succeed, my love!”

The letter had made no difference between us, except that the seat by his side had come to be mine; it made none now. He turned his old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his old way, and said again, “She will succeed, my dear. Nevertheless, Bleak House is thinning fast, O little woman!”

I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that. I was rather disappointed. I feared I might not quite have been all I had meant to be, since the letter and the answer.

Chapter 52

Obstinacy

ut one other day had intervened, when, early in the morning as we were going to breakfast, Mr Woodcourt came in haste with the astounding news that a terrible

murder had been committed, for which Mr George had been apprehended and was in custody. When he told us that a large reward was offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for the murderer’s apprehension, I did not in my first consternation understand why; but a few more words explained to me that the murdered person was Sir Leicester’s lawyer, and immediately my mother’s dread of him rushed into my remembrance.

This unforeseen and violent removal of one whom she had long watched and distrusted, and who had long watched and distrusted her; one for whom she could have had few intervals of kindness, always dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy; appeared so awful, that my first thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of such a death, and be able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember, perhaps, that she had sometimes even wished the old man away, who was so swiftly hurried out of life!

Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I always felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I could scarcely hold my place at the table. I was quite unable to follow the conversation, until I had had a little time to recover. But when I came to myself, and saw how shocked my Guardian was; and found that they were earnestly speaking of the suspected

man, and recalling every favourable impression we had formed of him, out of the good we had known of him; my interest and my fears were so strongly aroused in his behalf that I was quite set up again.

“Guardian, you don’t think it possible that he is justly accused?”

“My dear, I can’t think so. This man whom we have seen so open-hearted and compassionate; who, with the might of a giant, has the gentleness of a child; who looks as brave a fellow as ever lived, and is so simple and quiet with it; this man justly accused of such a crime? I can’t believe it. It’s not that I don’t or I won’t. I can’t!”

“And I can’t,” said Mr Woodcourt. “Still, whatever we believe or know of him, we had better not forget that some appearances are against him. He bore an animosity towards the deceased gentleman. He has openly mentioned it in many places. He is said to have expressed himself violently towards him, and he certainly did about him, to my knowledge. He admits that he was alone, on the scene of the murder, within a few minutes of its commission. I sincerely believe him to be as innocent of any participation in it, as I am; but these are all reasons for suspicion falling upon him.”

“True,” said my Guardian; and he added, turning to me, “it would be doing him a very bad service, my dear, to shut our eyes to the truth in any of these respects.”

I felt, of course, that we must admit, not only to ourselves but to others, the full force of the circumstances against him. Yet I knew withal (I could not help saying) that their weight would not induce us to desert him in his need.

“Heaven forbid!” returned my Guardian. “We will stand by

him, as he himself stood by the two poor creatures who are gone.” He meant Mr Gridley and the boy, to both of whom Mr George had given shelter.

Mr Woodcourt then told us that the trooper’s man had been with him before day, after wandering about the streets all night like a distracted creature. That one of the trooper’s first anxieties was that we should not suppose him guilty. That he had charged his messenger to represent his perfect innocence, with every solemn assurance he could send us. That Mr Woodcourt had only quieted the man by undertaking to come to our house very early in the morning, with these representations. He added that he was now upon his way to see the prisoner himself.

My Guardian said, directly, he would go too. Now, besides that I liked the retired soldier very much, and that he liked me, I had that secret interest in what had happened, which was only known to my Guardian. I felt as if it came close and near to me. It seemed to become personally important to myself that the truth should be discovered, and that no innocent people should be suspected; for suspicion, once run wild, might run wilder.

In a word, I felt as if it were my duty and obligation to go with them. My Guardian did not seek to dissuade me, and I went.

It was a large prison, with many courts and passages so like one another, and so uniformly paved, that I seemed to gain a new comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year, have had—as I have read—for a weed, or a stray blade of grass. In an arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs; with walls so glaringly white, that they made the massive iron window-bars and iron-bound door even more profoundly black than they were: we

found the trooper standing in a corner. He had been sitting on a bench there, and had risen when he heard the locks and bolts turn.

When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual heavy tread, and there stopped and made a slight bow. But as I still advanced, putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment.

“This is a load off my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen,” said he, saluting us with great heartiness and drawing a long breath. “And now I don’t so much care how it ends.”

He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner. What with his coolness and his soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard. “This is even a rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady in,” said Mr George, “but I know Miss Summerson will make the best of it.” As he handed me to the bench on which he had been

sitting, I sat down; which seemed to give him great satisfaction. “I thank you, miss,” said he.

“Now, George,” observed my Guardian, “as we require no new assurances on your part, so I believe we need give you none on ours.”

“Not at all, sir. I thank you with all my heart. If I was not innocent of this crime, I couldn’t look at you and keep my secret to myself, under the condescension of the present visit. I feel the present visit very much. I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I feel it, Miss Summerson and gentlemen, deeply.”

He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest, and bent his head to us. Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed a great amount of natural emotion by these simple means.

“First,” said my Guardian, “can we do anything for your personal comfort, George?”

“For which, sir?” he inquired, clearing his throat.

“For your personal comfort. Is there anything you want, that would lessen the hardship of this confinement?”

“Well, sir,” replied Mr George, after a little cogitation, “I am equally obliged to you; but tobacco being against the rules, I can’t say that there is.”

“You will think of many little things perhaps, by-and-by.

Whenever you do, George, let us know.”

“Thank you, sir. Howsoever,” observed Mr George, with one of his sunburnt smiles, “a man who has been knocking about the world in a vagabond kind of way as long as I have, gets on well enough in a place like the present, so far as that goes.”

“Next, as to your case,” observed my Guardian.

“Exactly so, sir,” returned Mr George, folding his arms upon his breast with perfect self-possession and a little curiosity.

“How does it stand now?”

“Why, sir, it is under remand at present. Bucket gives me to understand that he will probably apply for a series of remands from time to time until the case is more complete. How it is to be made more complete, I don’t myself see; but I dare say Bucket will manage it somehow.”

“Why, Heaven save us, man!” exclaimed my Guardian, surprised into his old oddity and vehemence, “you talk of yourself as if you were somebody else!”

“No offence, sir,” said Mr George. “I am very sensible of your kindness. But I don’t see how an innocent man is to make up his mind to this kind of thing without knocking his head against the

walls, unless he takes it in that point of view.”

“That is true enough to a certain extent,” returned my Guardian, softened. “But my good fellow, even an innocent man must take ordinary precautions to defend himself.”

“Certainly, sir. And I have done so. I have stated to the magistrates, ‘Gentlemen, I am as innocent of this charge as yourselves; what has been stated against me in the way of facts, is perfectly true; I know no more about it.’ I intend to continue stating that, sir. What more can I do? It’s the truth.”

“But the mere truth won’t do,” rejoined my Guardian.

“Won’t it, indeed, sir? Rather a bad look-out for me!” Mr George good-humouredly observed.

“You must have a lawyer,” pursued my Guardian. “We must! engage a good one for you.”

“I ask your pardon, sir,” said Mr George, with a step backward. “I am equally obliged. But I must decidedly beg to be excused from anything of that sort.”

“You won’t have a lawyer?”

“No, sir.” Mr George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. “I thank you all the same, sir, but—no lawyer!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t take kindly to the breed,” said Mr George. “Gridley didn’t. And—if you’ll excuse my saying so much—I should hardly have thought you did yourself, sir.”

“That’s Equity,” my Guardian explained, a little at a loss; “that’s Equity, George.”

“Is it, indeed, sir?” returned the trooper, in his offhand manner. “I am not acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a general way I object to the breed.”

Unfolding his arms, and changing his position, he stood with one massive hand upon the table, and the other on his hip, as complete a picture of a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as ever I saw. It was in vain that we all three talked to him, and endeavoured to persuade him; he listened with that gentleness which went so well with his bluff bearing, but was evidently no more shaken by our representations than his place of confinement was.

“Pray think, once more, Mr George,” said I. “Have you no wish in reference to your case?”

“I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss,” he returned, “by court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware. If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a couple of minutes, miss, not more, I’ll endeavour to explain myself as clearly as I can.”

He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and after a moment’s reflection went on.

“You see, miss, I have been handcuffed and taken into custody, and brought here. I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am. My shooting-gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such property as I have—’tis small—is turned this way and that, till it don’t know itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am! I don’t particular complain of that. Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately preceding fault of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn’t gone into the vagabond way in my youth, this wouldn’t have happened. It has happened. Then comes the question how to meet it.”

He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment, with a good-

humoured look, and said apologetically, “I am such a short-winded talker that I must think a bit.” Having thought a bit, he looked up again, and resumed.

“How to meet it. Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a lawyer, and had a pretty tight hold of me. I don’t wish to rake up his ashes, but he had, what I should call if he was living, a Devil of a tight hold of me. I don’t like his trade the better for that. If I had kept clear of his trade, I should have kept outside this place. But that’s not what I mean. Now suppose I had killed him. Suppose I really had discharged into his body any one of those pistols recently fired off, that Bucket has found at my place, and, dear me! might have found there any day since it has been my place. What should I have done as soon as I was hard and fast here? Got a lawyer.”

He stopped on hearing some one at the locks and bolts, and did not resume until the door had been opened and was shut again. For what purpose opened I will mention presently.

“I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have often read in the newspapers), ‘my client says nothing, my client reserves his defence—my client this, that, and t’other.’ Well; ’tis not the custom of that breed to go straight, according to my opinion, or to think that other men do. Say, I am innocent, and I get a lawyer. He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; perhaps more. What would he do, whether or not? Act as if I was;—shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps! But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or would I rather be hanged in my own way—if you’ll excuse my mentioning anything so disagreeable to a lady?”

He had warmed into his subject now, and was under no further necessity to wait a bit.

“I would rather be hanged in my own way. And I mean to be! I don’t intend to say,” looking round upon us, with his powerful arms akimbo and his dark eyebrows raised, “that I am more partial to being hanged than another man. What I say is, I must come off clear and full or not at all. Therefore, when I hear stated against me what is true, I say it’s true; and when they tell me, ‘whatever you say will be used,’ I tell them I don’t mind that; I mean it to be used. If they can’t make me innocent out of the whole truth, they are not likely to do it out of anything less, or anything else. And if they are, it’s worth nothing to me.”

Taking a pace or two over the stone floor, he came back to the table, and finished what he had to say.

“I thank you, miss, and gentlemen both, many times for your attention, and many times more for your interest. That’s the plain state of the matter, as it points itself out to a mere trooper with a blunt broadsword kind of a mind. I have never done well in life, beyond my duty as a soldier; and if the worst comes after all, I shall reap pretty much as I have sown. When I got over the first crash of being seized as a murderer—it don’t take a rover, who has knocked about so much as myself, so very long to recover from a crash—I worked my way round to what you find me now. As such, I shall remain. No relations will be disgraced by me, or made unhappy for me, and—and that’s all I’ve got to say.”

The door had been opened to admit another soldier-looking man of less prepossessing appearance at first sight, and a weather- tanned bright-eyed wholesome woman with a basket, who, from her entrance, had been exceedingly attentive to all Mr George had

said. Mr George had received them with a familiar nod and a friendly look, but without any more particular greeting in the midst of his address. He now shook them cordially by the hand, and said, “Miss Summerson and gentlemen, this is an old comrade of mine, Joseph Bagnet. And this is his wife, Mrs Bagnet.”

Mr Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs Bagnet dropped us a curtsey.

“Real good friends of mine they are,” said Mr George. “It was at their house I was taken.”

“With a second-hand wiolinceller,” Mr Bagnet put in, twitching his head angrily. “Of a good tone. For a friend. That money was no object to.”

“Mat,” said Mr George, “you have heard pretty well all I have been saying to this lady and these two gentlemen. I know it meets your approval?”

Mr Bagnet, after considering, referred the point to his wife. “Old girl,” said he. “Tell him. Whether or not. It meets my approval.”

“Why, George,” exclaimed Mrs Bagnet, who had been unpacking her basket, in which there was a piece of cold pickled pork, a little tea and sugar, and a brown loaf, “you ought to know it don’t. You ought to know it’s enough to drive a person wild to hear you. You won’t be got off this way, and you won’t be got off that way—what do you mean by such picking and choosing? It’s stuff and nonsense, George.”

“Don’t be severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs Bagnet,” said the trooper, lightly.

“Oh! Bother your misfortunes!” cried Mrs Bagnet, if they don’t make you more reasonable than that comes to. I never was so

ashamed in my life to hear a man talk folly, as I have been to hear you talk this day to the present company. Lawyers? Why, what but too many cooks should hinder you from having a dozen lawyers, if the gentleman recommended them to you.”

“This is a very sensible woman,” said my Guardian. “I hope you will persuade him, Mrs Bagnet.”

“Persuade him, sir?” she returned. “Lord bless you, no. You don’t know George. Now, there!” Mrs Bagnet left her basket to point him out with both her bare brown hands. “There he stands! As self-willed and as determined a man, in the wrong way, as ever put a human creature under Heaven, out of patience! You could as soon take up and shoulder an eight-and-forty pounder by your own strength, as turn that man, when he has got a thing into his head, and fixed it there. Why, don’t I know him!” cried Mrs Bagnet. “Don’t I know you, George! You don’t mean to set up for a new character with me, after all these years, I hope?”

Her friendly indignation had an exemplary effect upon her husband, who shook his head at the trooper several times, as a silent recommendation to him to yield. Between whiles, Mrs Bagnet looked at me; and I understood, from the play of her eyes, that she wished me to do something, though I did not comprehend what.

“But I have given up talking to you, old fellow, years and years,” said Mrs Bagnet, as she blew a little dust off the pickled pork, looking at me again; “and when ladies and gentlemen know you as well as I do, they’ll give up talking to you too. If you are not too headstrong to accept of a bit of dinner, here it is.”

“I accept it with many thanks,” returned the trooper.

“Do you though indeed?” said Mrs Bagnet, continuing to

grumble on good-humouredly. “I’m sure I’m surprised at that. I wonder you don’t starve in your own way also. It would only be like you. Perhaps you’ll set your mind upon that, next.” Here she again looked at me; and I now perceived, from her glances at the door and at me, by turns, that she wished us to retire, and to await her following us, outside the prison. Communicating this by similar means to my Guardian, and Mr Woodcourt, I rose.

“We hope you will think better of it, Mr George,” said I; “and we shall come to see you again, trusting to find you more reasonable.”

“More grateful, Miss Summerson, you can’t find me,” he returned.

“But more persuadable we can, I hope,” said I. “And let me entreat you to consider that the clearing up of this mystery, and the discovery of the real perpetrator of this deed, may be of the last importance to others besides yourself.”

He heard me respectfully, but without much heeding these words, which I spoke, a little turned from him, already on my way to the door; he was observing (this they afterwards told me) my height and figure, which seemed to catch his attention all at once.

“‘Tis curious,” said he. “And yet I thought so at the time!” My Guardian asked him what he meant.

“Why, sir,” he answered, “when my ill-fortune took me to the dead man’s staircase on the night of his murder, I saw a shape so like Miss Summerson’s go by me in the dark, that I had half a mind to speak to it.”

For an instant, I felt such a shudder as I never felt before or since, and hope I shall never feel again.”

“It came downstairs as I went up,” said the trooper, “and

crossed the moonlighted window with a loose black mantle on; I noticed a deep fringe to it. However, it has nothing to do with the present subject, excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at the moment, that it came into my head.”

I cannot separate and define the feelings that arose in me after this: it is enough that the vague duty and obligation I had felt upon me from the first of following the investigation, was, without my distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased; and that I was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a reason for my being afraid.

We three went out of the prison, and walked up and down at some short distance from the gate, which was in a retired place. We had not waited long, when Mr and Mrs Bagnet came out too, and quickly joined us.

There was a tear in each of Mrs Bagnet’s eyes, and her face was flushed and hurried. “I didn’t let George see what I thought about it, you know, miss,” was her first remark when she came up; “but he’s in a bad way, poor old fellow!”

“Not with care and prudence, and good help,” said my Guardian.

“A gentleman like you ought to know best, sir,” returned Mrs Bagnet, hurriedly drying her eyes on the hem of her grey cloak; “but I am uneasy for him. He has been so careless, and said so much that he never meant. The gentlemen of the juries might not understand him as Lignum and me do. And then such a number of circumstances have happened bad for him, and such a number of people will be brought forward to speak against him, and Bucket is so deep.”

“With a second-hand wiolinceller. And said he played the fife.

When a boy.” Mr Bagnet added, with great solemnity.

“Now, I tell you, miss,” said Mrs Bagnet; “and when I say miss, I mean all! Just come into the corner of the wall, and I’ll tell you!”

Mrs Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place, and was at first too breathless to proceed; occasioning Mr Bagnet to say, “Old girl! Tell ’em!”

“Why then, miss,” the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of her bonnet for more air, “you could as soon move Dover Castle as move George on this point, unless you had got a new power to move him with. And I have got it!”

“You are a jewel of a woman,” said my Guardian. “Go on!” “Now, I tell you miss,” she proceeded, clapping her hands in

her hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, “that what he says concerning no relations is all bosh. They don’t know of him, but he does know of them. He has said more to me at odd times than to anybody else, and it warn’t for nothing that he once spoke to my Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers’ heads. For fifty pounds he had seen his mother that day. She’s alive, and must be brought here straight!”

Instantly Mrs Bagnet put some pins into her mouth, and began pinning up her skirts all round, a little higher than the level of her grey cloak; which she accomplished with surprising dispatch and dexterity.

“Lignum,” said Mrs Bagnet, “you take care of the children, old man, and give me the umbrella! I’m away to Lincolnshire, to bring that old lady here.”

“But, bless the woman!” cried my Guardian, with his hand in his pocket, “how is she going? What money has she got?”

Mrs Bagnet made another application to her skirts, and

brought forth a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a few shillings, and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction. “Never you mind for me, miss, I’m a soldier’s wife, and accustomed to travelling in my own way. Lignum, old boy,” kissing him, “one for yourself; three for the children. Now, I’m

away into Lincolnshire after George’s mother!”

And she actually set off while we three stood looking at one another lost in amazement. She actually trudged away in her grey cloak at a sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and was gone.

“Mr Bagnet,” said my Guardian. “Do you mean to let her go in that way?”

“Can’t help it,” he returned. “Made her way home once. From another quarter of the world. With the same grey cloak. And same umbrella. Whatever the old girl says, do. Do it! Whenever the old girl says, I’ll do it. She does it.”

“Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks,” rejoined my Guardian, “and it is impossible to say more for her.”

“She’s Colour-Serjeant of the Nonpareil Battalion,” said Mr Bagnet, looking at us over his shoulder, as he went his way also. “And there’s not such another. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.”

Chapter 53

The Track