Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

herself at the fire in the writing-room, which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour

candlestick, throwing the candle in to make it burn better.

Everything was just as we had left it last night and was evidently

intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been

taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust,

and waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a

milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open; and we met

the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her

mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see

what o’clock it was.

 

But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and

down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to

see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk.

So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may

mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and

that I really should not have thought she liked me much unless she

had told me so.

 

“Where would you wish to go?” she asked.

 

“Anywhere, my dear,” I replied.

 

“Anywhere’s nowhere,” said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

 

“Let us go somewhere at any rate,” said I.

 

She then walked me on very fast.

 

“I don’t care!” she said. “Now, you are my witness, Miss

Summerson, I say I don’t care—but if he was to come to our house

with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he

was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.

Such ASSES as he and Ma make of themselves!”

 

“My dear!” I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the

vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. “Your duty as a child—”

 

“Oh! Don’t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where’s Ma’s

duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I

suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it’s

much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say!

Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there’s

an end of it!”

 

She walked me on faster yet.

 

“But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come,

and I won’t have anything to say to him. I can’t bear him. If

there’s any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it’s the

stuff he and Ma talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our

house can have the patience to stay there and be a witness of such

inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense,

and Ma’s management!”

 

I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young

gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the

disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada

coming up at a round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to

run a race. Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent and

walked moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions

and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to

and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy

preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping

out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly

groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse.

 

“So, cousin,” said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind me.

“We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way

to our place of meeting yesterday, and—by the Great Seal, here’s

the old lady again!”

 

Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and

smiling, and saying with her yesterday’s air of patronage, “The

wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!”

 

“You are out early, ma’am,” said I as she curtsied to me.

 

“Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It’s

retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day,”

said the old lady mincingly. “The business of the day requires a

great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to

follow.”

 

“Who’s this, Miss Summerson?” whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my

arm tighter through her own.

 

The little old lady’s hearing was remarkably quick. She answered

for herself directly.

 

“A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend

court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of

addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?” said the

old lady, recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a

very low curtsy.

 

Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday,

good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with

the suit.

 

“Ha!” said the old lady. “She does not expect a judgment? She

will still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This is the

garden of Lincoln’s Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower

in the summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the

greater part of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You

find the long vacation exceedingly long, don’t you?”

 

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

 

“When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more

flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor’s

court,” said the old lady, “the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth

seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and

see my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope,

and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time since I

had a visit from either.”

 

She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away,

beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse

myself and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and

half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady

without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada

continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us all the

time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.

 

It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by that

we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before

she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old

lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of

some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and

said, “This is my lodging. Pray walk up!”

 

She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND

BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN

MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red

paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old

rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another,

KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another,

WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES

BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold

there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty

bottles—blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am

reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several

little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of

being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the

law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little

tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled

“Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated

were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and

Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the

firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to

do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable

man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with

neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within.

There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A

little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment

scrolls and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have

fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been

hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors

of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags

tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale,

hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been

counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as

Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that

yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean,

were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

 

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides

by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a

couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted

lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying

about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight

of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk

sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible

smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat,

chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled

with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward

like some old root in a fall of snow.

 

“Hi, hi!” said the old man, coming to the door. “Have you anything

to sell?”

 

We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been

trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her

pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the

pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being

pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She

became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties

that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was

so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good

omen she desired, that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing

for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious;

at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers and

said, “Aye, aye! Please her! It won’t take a minute! Come in,

come in! Come in through the shop if t’other door’s out of order!”

we all went in, stimulated by Richard’s laughing encouragement and

relying on his protection.

 

“My landlord, Krook,” said the little old lady, condescending to

him from her lofty station as she presented him to us. “He is

called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is

called the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He

is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!”

 

She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with

her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to

excuse him, “For he is a little—you know—M!” said the old lady

with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.

 

“It’s true enough,” he said, going before us with the lantern,

“that they call me the Lord Chancellor and call my