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

of fact, shouldn’t have darkened these doors again, but

should have seen ‘em further first.”

 

Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his

hair with both hands.

 

“Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I

was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and

whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time

apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call

sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely

difficult for me to be sure that I hadn’t inadvertently led up to

something contrary to Miss Summerson’s wishes. Self-praise is no

recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man

of business neither.”

 

Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately

withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else.

 

“Indeed, it has been made so hard,” he goes on, “to have any idea

what that party was up to in combination with others that until the

loss which we all deplore I was gravelled—an expression which your

ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to

consider tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise—a name by

which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship

is not acquainted with—got to be so close and double-faced that at

times it wasn’t easy to keep one’s hands off his ‘ead. However,

what with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the

help of a mutual friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a

high aristocratic turn and has your ladyship’s portrait always

hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an apprehension as

to which I come to put your ladyship upon your guard. First, will

your ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange

visitors this morning? I don’t mean fashionable visitors, but such

visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary’s old servant, or as a

person without the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs

similarly to a guy?”

 

“No!”

 

“Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and

have been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and

waited at the corner of the square till they came out, and took

half an hour’s turn afterwards to avoid them.”

 

“What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not

understand you. What do you mean?”

 

“Your ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There may be no

occasion for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep

my promise to Miss Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small

has dropped, and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that

those letters I was to have brought to your ladyship were not

destroyed when I supposed they were. That if there was anything to

be blown upon, it IS blown upon. That the visitors I have alluded

to have been here this morning to make money of it. And that the

money is made, or making.”

 

Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises.

 

“Your ladyship, you know best whether there’s anything in what I

say or whether there’s nothing. Something or nothing, I have acted

up to Miss Summerson’s wishes in letting things alone and in

undoing what I had begun to do, as far as possible; that’s

sufficient for me. In case I should be taking a liberty in putting

your ladyship on your guard when there’s no necessity for it, you

will endeavour, I should hope, to outlive my presumption, and I

shall endeavour to outlive your disapprobation. I now take my

farewell of your ladyship, and assure you that there’s no danger of

your ever being waited on by me again.”

 

She scarcely acknowledges these parting words by any look, but when

he has been gone a little while, she rings her bell.

 

“Where is Sir Leicester?”

 

Mercury reports that he is at present shut up in the library alone.

 

“Has Sir Leicester had any visitors this morning?”

 

Several, on business. Mercury proceeds to a description of them,

which has been anticipated by Mr. Guppy. Enough; he may go.

 

So! All is broken down. Her name is in these many mouths, her

husband knows his wrongs, her shame will be published—may be

spreading while she thinks about it—and in addition to the

thunderbolt so long foreseen by her, so unforeseen by him, she is

denounced by an invisible accuser as the murderess of her enemy.

 

Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often wished him dead.

Her enemy he is, even in his grave. This dreadful accusation comes

upon her like a new torment at his lifeless hand. And when she

recalls how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she

may be represented to have sent her favourite girl away so soon

before merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as

if the hangman’s hands were at her neck.

 

She has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all

wildly scattered and her face buried in the cushions of a couch.

She rises up, hurries to and fro, flings herself down again, and

rocks and moans. The horror that is upon her is unutterable. If

she really were the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment,

more intense.

 

For as her murderous perspective, before the doing of the deed,

however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have been

closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure,

preventing her from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those

consequences would have rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the

moment the figure was laid low—which always happens when a murder

is done; so, now she sees that when he used to be on the watch

before her, and she used to think, “if some mortal stroke would but

fall on this old man and take him from my way!” it was but wishing

that all he held against her in his hand might be flung to the

winds and chance-sown in many places. So, too, with the wicked

relief she has felt in his death. What was his death but the key-stone of a gloomy arch removed, and now the arch begins to fall in

a thousand fragments, each crushing and mangling piecemeal!

 

Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that

from this pursuer, living or dead—obdurate and imperturbable

before her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and

imperturbable in his coffin-bed—there is no escape but in death.

Hunted, she flies. The complication of her shame, her dread,

remorse, and misery, overwhelms her at its height; and even her

strength of self-reliance is overturned and whirled away like a

leaf before a mighty wind.

 

She hurriedly addresses these lines to her husband, seals, and

leaves them on her table:

 

If I am sought for, or accused of, his murder, believe that I am

wholly innocent. Believe no other good of me, for I am innocent of

nothing else that you have heard, or will hear, laid to my charge.

He prepared me, on that fatal night, for his disclosure of my guilt

to you. After he had left me, I went out on pretence of walking in

the garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him and

make one last petition that he would not protract the dreadful

suspense on which I have been racked by him, you do not know how

long, but would mercifully strike next morning.

 

I found his house dark and silent. I rang twice at his door, but

there was no reply, and I came home.

 

I have no home left. I will encumber you no more. May you, in

your just resentment, be able to forget the unworthy woman on whom

you have wasted a most generous devotion—who avoids you only with

a deeper shame than that with which she hurries from herself—and

who writes this last adieu.

 

She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all her jewels and her money,

listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall is empty, opens

and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill frosty wind.