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

at home. My

apprehension is, Mr. C.‘s circumstances being such, lest it should

end in his obtaining leave to part with his commission, which at all

events is desirable to be made known to his connexions.”

 

Mr. Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into

the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was

his tone, and looked before him again.

 

“Imagine the poor fellow without even his present resource,” said

my guardian to me. “Yet what can I do? You know him, Esther. He

would never accept of help from me now. To offer it or hint at it

would be to drive him to an extremity, if nothing else did.”

 

Mr. Vholes hereupon addressed me again.

 

“What Mr. Jarndyce remarks, miss, is no doubt the case, and is the

difficulty. I do not see that anything is to be done, I do not say

that anything is to be done. Far from it. I merely come down here

under the seal of confidence and mention it in order that

everything may be openly carried on and that it may not be said

afterwards that everything was not openly carried on. My wish is

that everything should be openly carried on. I desire to leave a

good name behind me. If I consulted merely my own interests with

Mr. C., I should not be here. So insurmountable, as you must well

know, would be his objections. This is not a professional

attendance. This can he charged to nobody. I have no interest in

it except as a member of society and a father—AND a son,” said Mr.

Vholes, who had nearly forgotten that point.

 

It appeared to us that Mr. Vholes said neither more nor less than

the truth in intimating that he sought to divide the responsibility,

such as it was, of knowing Richard’s situation. I could only

suggest that I should go down to Deal, where Richard was then

stationed, and see him, and try if it were possible to avert the

worst. Without consulting Mr. Vholes on this point, I took my

guardian aside to propose it, while Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to

the fire and warmed his funeral gloves.

 

The fatigue of the journey formed an immediate objection on my

guardian’s part, but as I saw he had no other, and as I was only

too happy to go, I got his consent. We had then merely to dispose

of Mr. Vholes.

 

“Well, sir,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “Miss Summerson will communicate

with Mr. Carstone, and you can only hope that his position may be

yet retrievable. You will allow me to order you lunch after your

journey, sir.”

 

“I thank you, Mr. Jarndyce,” said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long

black sleeve to check the ringing of the bell, “not any. I thank

you, no, not a morsel. My digestion is much impaired, and I am but

a poor knife and fork at any time. If I was to partake of solid

food at this period of the day, I don’t know what the consequences

might be. Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will

now with your permission take my leave.”

 

“And I would that you could take your leave, and we could all take

our leave, Mr. Vholes,” returned my guardian bitterly, “of a cause

you know of.”

 

Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep from head to foot that it

had quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very unpleasant

perfume, made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the

neck and slowly shook it.

 

“We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the light of

respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the

wheel. We do it, sir. At least, I do it myself; and I wish to

think well of my professional brethren, one and all. You are

sensible of an obligation not to refer to me, miss, in communicating

with Mr. C.?”

 

I said I would be careful not to do it.

 

“Just so, miss. Good morning. Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir.”

Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any

hand in it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian’s fingers, and

took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of

the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and

London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.

 

Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and why

I was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed. But she

was too true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and words

of excuse, and in a more loving spirit still—my dear devoted

girl!—she wrote him a long letter, of which I took charge.

 

Charley was to be my travelling companion, though I am sure I

wanted none and would willingly have left her at home. We all went

to London that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail,

secured them. At our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling

away seaward with the Kentish letters.

 

It was a night’s journey in those coach times, but we had the mail

to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious. It passed

with me as I suppose it would with most people under such

circumstances. At one while my journey looked hopeful, and at

another hopeless. Now I thought I should do some good, and now I

wondered how I could ever have supposed so. Now it seemed one of

the most reasonable things in the world that I should have come,

and now one of the most unreasonable. In what state I should find

Richard, what I should say to him, and what he would say to me

occupied my mind by turns with these two states of feeling; and the

wheels seemed to play one tune (to which the burden of my

guardian’s letter set itself) over and over again all night.

 

At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy

they were upon a raw misty morning. The long flat beach, with its

little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of

capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with

tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with

grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever

saw. The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else

was moving but a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted

round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of

existence, they were spinning themselves into cordage.

 

But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel and sat

down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it

was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more

cheerful. Our little room was like a ship’s cabin, and that

delighted Charley very much. Then the fog began to rise like a

curtain, and numbers of ships that we had had no idea were near

appeared. I don’t know how many sail the waiter told us were then

lying in the downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size—one

was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone through

the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which

these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of

boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the

shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything

around them, was most beautiful.

 

The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come

into the downs in the night. She was surrounded by boats, and we

said how glad the people on board of her must be to come ashore.

Charley was curious, too, about the voyage, and about the heat in

India, and the serpents and the tigers; and as she picked up such

information much faster than grammar, I told her what I knew on

those points. I told her, too, how people in such voyages were

sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the

intrepidity and humanity of one man. And Charley asking how that

could be, I told her how we knew at home of such a case.

 

I had thought of sending Richard a note saying I was there, but it

seemed so much better to go to him without preparation. As he

lived in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was

feasible, but we went out to reconnoitre. Peeping in at the gate

of the barrack-yard, we found everything very quiet at that time in

the morning, and I asked a sergeant standing on the guardhouse-steps where he lived. He sent a man before to show me, who went up

some bare stairs, and knocked with his knuckles at a door, and left

us.

 

“Now then!” cried Richard from within. So I left Charley in the

little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, “Can I

come in, Richard? It’s only Dame Durden.”

 

He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin

cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus strewn all about the

floor. He was only half dressed—in plain clothes, I observed, not

in uniform—and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as

his room. All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I

was seated near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and

caught me in his arms in a moment. Dear Richard! He was ever the

same to me. Down to—ah, poor poor fellow!—to the end, he never

received me but with something of his old merry boyish manner.

 

“Good heaven, my dear little woman,” said he, “how do you come

here? Who could have thought of seeing you! Nothing the matter?

Ada is well?”

 

“Quite well. Lovelier than ever, Richard!”

 

“Ah!” he said, leaning back in his chair. “My poor cousin! I was

writing to you, Esther.”

 

So worn and haggard as he looked, even in the fullness of his

handsome youth, leaning back in his chair and crushing the closely

written sheet of paper in his hand!

 

“Have you been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to

read it after all?” I asked.

 

“Oh, my dear,” he returned with a hopeless gesture. “You may read

it in the whole room. It is all over here.”

 

I mildly entreated him not to be despondent. I told him that I had

heard by chance of his being in difficulty and had come to consult

with him what could best be done.

 

“Like you, Esther, but useless, and so NOT like you!” said he with

a melancholy smile. “I am away on leave this day—should have been

gone in another hour—and that is to smooth it over, for my selling

out. Well! Let bygones be bygones. So this calling follows the

rest. I only want to have been in the church to have made the

round of all the professions.”

 

“Richard,” I urged, “it is not so hopeless as that?”

 

“Esther,” he returned, “it is indeed. I am just so near disgrace

as that those who are put in authority over me (as the catechism

goes) would far rather be without me than with me. And they are

right. Apart from debts and duns and all such drawbacks, I am not

fit even for this employment. I have no care, no mind, no heart,

no soul, but for one thing. Why, if this bubble hadn’t broken

now,”