Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Performer: 0141439726
Book online «Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗». Author Charles Dickens
at a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that house of
entertainment there’s a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner got up
to fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets
was; she was rather a long time gone and came back a little out of
wind. As soon as they came home this was reported to me by Mrs.
Bucket, along with her observations and suspicions. I had the
piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our
men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there
half-a-dozen hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further
through mine, and hold it steady, and I shan’t hurt you!”
In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist. “That’s one,”
says Mr. Bucket. “Now the other, darling. Two, and all told!”
He rises; she rises too. “Where,” she asks him, darkening her
large eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them—and yet
they stare, “where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed
wife?”
“She’s gone forrard to the Police Office,” returns Mr. Bucket.
“You’ll see her there, my dear.”
“I would like to kiss her!” exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting
tigress-like.
“You’d bite her, I suspect,” says Mr. Bucket.
“I would!” making her eyes very large. “I would love to tear her
limb from limb.”
“Bless you, darling,” says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure,
“I’m fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising
animosity against one another when you do differ. You don’t mind
me half so much, do you?”
“No. Though you are a devil still.”
“Angel and devil by turns, eh?” cries Mr. Bucket. “But I am in my
regular employment, you must consider. Let me put your shawl tidy.
I’ve been lady’s maid to a good many before now. Anything wanting
to the bonnet? There’s a cab at the door.”
Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an indignant eye at the glass,
shakes herself perfectly neat in one shake and looks, to do her
justice, uncommonly genteel.
“Listen then, my angel,” says she after several sarcastic nods.
“You are very spiritual. But can you restore him back to life?”
Mr. Bucket answers, “Not exactly.”
“That is droll. Listen yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can
you make a honourable lady of her?”
“Don’t be so malicious,” says Mr. Bucket.
“Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?” cries mademoiselle, referring to
Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain. “Eh! Oh, then regard him!
The poor infant! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“Come, come, why this is worse PARLAYING than the other,” says Mr.
Bucket. “Come along!”
“You cannot do these things? Then you can do as you please with
me. It is but the death, it is all the same. Let us go, my angel.
Adieu, you old man, grey. I pity you, and I despise you!”
With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if her mouth
closed with a spring. It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket
gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar
to himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering
away with her as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of
his affections.
Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though
he were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At
length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted,
rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a
few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and
with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems
to stare at something.
Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold,
the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers
defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most
precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands
of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to
his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with
something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he
addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.
It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for
years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has
never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired,
honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at
the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities
of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love,
susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he
feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot
bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced
so well.
And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of
his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like
distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone
of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.
Flight
Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great
blow, as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with
sleep preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and
along the freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of
Lincolnshire, making its way towards London.
Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle
and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the
wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such
things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly
unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground
is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers
desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick
and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of
embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of
rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles
appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything
looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the
freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its
way without a railroad on its mind.
Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits
within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey
cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as
being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in
accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell
is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The
old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her
stately manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness,
puts it often to her lips. “You are a mother, my dear soul,” says
she many times, “and you found out my George’s mother!”
“Why, George,” returns Mrs. Bagnet, “was always free with me,
ma’am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the
things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man,
the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful
line into his mother’s face or turned a hair of her head grey, then
I felt sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own
mother into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in past
times, that he had behaved bad to her.”
“Never, my dear!” returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears.
“My blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving
to me, was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a
little wild and went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first,
in letting us know about himself, till he should rise to be an
officer; and when he didn’t rise, I know he considered himself
beneath us, and wouldn’t be a disgrace to us. For he had a lion
heart, had my George, always from a baby!”
The old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls,
all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay
good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at
Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young
gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had
been angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy.
And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad
stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends
under its load of affectionate distress.
Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart,
leaves the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while—not
without passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes—
and presently chirps up in her cheery manner, “So I says to George
when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his
pipe outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious
sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in
season and out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you
so melancholy penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s
because I AM melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you
see me so.’ ‘What have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs.
Bagnet,’ says George, shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been
done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be undone now.
If I ever get to heaven it won’t be for being a good son to a
widowed mother; I say no more.’ Now, ma’am, when George says to me
that it’s best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I
have often had before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to
have such things on him that afternoon. Then George tells me that
he has seen by chance, at the lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that
has brought his mother plain before him, and he runs on about that
old lady till he quite forgets himself and paints her picture to me
as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to George when
he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me
it’s Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper for more than half a century to
the Dedlock family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George
has frequently told me before that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I
says to my old Lignum that night, ‘Lignum, that’s his mother for
five and for-ty pound!’”
All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least
within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird,
with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady
above the hum of the wheels.
“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “Bless you, and
thank you, my worthy soul!”
“Dear heart!” cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. “No
thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma’am, for being so
ready to pay ‘em! And mind once more, ma’am, what you had best do
on finding George to be your own son is to make him—for your sake
—have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear
himself of a charge
Comments (0)