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

class="calibre1">my humble roof!” with a special curtsy. “Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear”—

she had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called

her by it—“a double welcome!”

 

“Has she been very ill?” asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom

we had found in attendance on her. She answered for herself

directly, though he had put the question in a whisper.

 

“Oh, decidedly unwell! Oh, very unwell indeed,” she said

confidentially. “Not pain, you know—trouble. Not bodily so much

as nervous, nervous! The truth is,” in a subdued voice and

trembling, “we have had death here. There was poison in the house.

I am very susceptible to such horrid things. It frightened me.

Only Mr. Woodcourt knows how much. My physician, Mr. Woodcourt!”

with great stateliness. “The wards in Jarndyce—Jarndyce of Bleak

House—Fitz-Jarndyce!”

 

“Miss Flite,” said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he

were appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand

gently on her arm, “Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual

accuracy. She was alarmed by an occurrence in the house which

might have alarmed a stronger person, and was made ill by the

distress and agitation. She brought me here in the first hurry of

the discovery, though too late for me to be of any use to the

unfortunate man. I have compensated myself for that disappointment

by coming here since and being of some small use to her.”

 

“The kindest physician in the college,” whispered Miss Flite to me.

“I expect a judgment. On the day of judgment. And shall then

confer estates.”

 

“She will be as well in a day or two,” said Mr. Woodcourt, looking

at her with an observant smile, “as she ever will be. In other

words, quite well of course. Have you heard of her good fortune?”

 

“Most extraordinary!” said Miss Flite, smiling brightly. “You

never heard of such a thing, my dear! Every Saturday, Conversation

Kenge or Guppy (clerk to Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper

of shillings. Shillings. I assure you! Always the same number in

the paper. Always one for every day in the week. Now you know,

really! So well-timed, is it not? Ye-es! From whence do these

papers come, you say? That is the great question. Naturally.

Shall I tell you what I think? I think,” said Miss Flite, drawing

herself back with a very shrewd look and shaking her right

forefinger in a most significant manner, “that the Lord Chancellor,

aware of the length of time during which the Great Seal has been

open (for it has been open a long time!), forwards them. Until the

judgment I expect is given. Now that’s very creditable, you know.

To confess in that way that he IS a little slow for human life. So

delicate! Attending court the other day—I attend it regularly,

with my documents—I taxed him with it, and he almost confessed.

That is, I smiled at him from my bench, and HE smiled at me from

his bench. But it’s great good fortune, is it not? And Fitz-Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great advantage. Oh, I

assure you to the greatest advantage!”

 

I congratulated her (as she addressed herself to me) upon this

fortunate addition to her income and wished her a long continuance

of it. I did not speculate upon the source from which it came or

wonder whose humanity was so considerate. My guardian stood before

me, contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond him.

 

“And what do you call these little fellows, ma’am?” said he in his

pleasant voice. “Have they any names?”

 

“I can answer for Miss Flite that they have,” said I, “for she

promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?”

 

Ada remembered very well.

 

“Did I?” said Miss Flite. “Who’s that at my door? What are you

listening at my door for, Krook?”

 

The old man of the house, pushing it open before him, appeared

there with his fur cap in his hand and his cat at his heels.

 

“I warn’t listening, Miss Flite,” he said, “I was going to give a

rap with my knuckles, only you’re so quick!”

 

“Make your cat go down. Drive her away!” the old lady angrily

exclaimed.

 

“Bah, bah! There ain’t no danger, gentlefolks,” said Mr. Krook,

looking slowly and sharply from one to another until he had looked

at all of us; “she’d never offer at the birds when I was here

unless I told her to it.”

 

“You will excuse my landlord,” said the old lady with a dignified

air. “M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I have company?”

 

“Hi!” said the old man. “You know I am the Chancellor.”

 

“Well?” returned Miss Elite. “What of that?”

 

“For the Chancellor,” said the old man with a chuckle, “not to be

acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain’t it, Miss Flite?

Mightn’t I take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce

and Jarndyce a’most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire

Tom, sir. I never to my knowledge see you afore though, not even

in court. Yet, I go there a mortal sight of times in the course of

the year, taking one day with another.”

 

“I never go there,” said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any

consideration). “I would sooner go—somewhere else.”

 

“Would you though?” returned Krook, grinning. “You’re bearing hard

upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though

perhaps it is but nat’ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir!

What, you’re looking at my lodger’s birds, Mr. Jarndyce?” The old

man had come by little and little into the room until he now

touched my guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his

face with his spectacled eyes. “It’s one of her strange ways that

she’ll never tell the names of these birds if she can help it,

though she named ‘em all.” This was in a whisper. “Shall I run

‘em over, Flite?” he asked aloud, winking at us and pointing at her

as she turned away, affecting to sweep the grate.

 

“If you like,” she answered hurriedly.

 

The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us, went

through the list.

 

“Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want,

Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags,

Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That’s

the whole collection,” said the old man, “all cooped up together,

by my noble and learned brother.”

 

“This is a bitter wind!” muttered my guardian.

 

“When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they’re to

be let go free,” said Krook, winking at us again. “And then,” he

added, whispering and grinning, “if that ever was to happen—which

it won’t—the birds that have never been caged would kill ‘em.”

 

“If ever the wind was in the east,” said my guardian, pretending to

look out of the window for a weathercock, “I think it’s there to-day!”

 

We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not

Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature

in consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be.

It was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr.

Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have

attended him more closely. He proposed to show us his Court of

Chancery and all the strange medley it contained; during the whole

of our inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr.

Jarndyce and sometimes detained him under one pretence or other

until we had passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination

to enter upon some secret subject which he could not make up his

mind to approach. I cannot imagine a countenance and manner more

singularly expressive of caution and indecision, and a perpetual

impulse to do something he could not resolve to venture on, than

Mr. Krook’s was that day. His watchfulness of my guardian was

incessant. He rarely removed his eyes from his face. If he went

on beside him, he observed him with the slyness of an old white

fox. If he went before, he looked back. When we stood still, he

got opposite to him, and drawing his hand across and across his

open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of power, and

turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until they

appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face.

 

At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the

house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber,

which was certainly curious, we came into the back part of the

shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an

ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and

against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in

several plain hands.

 

“What are you doing here?” asked my guardian.

 

“Trying to learn myself to read and write,” said Krook.

 

“And how do you get on?”

 

“Slow. Bad,” returned the old man impatiently. “It’s hard at my

time of life.”

 

“It would be easier to be taught by some one,” said my guardian.

 

“Aye, but they might teach me wrong!” returned the old man with a

wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. “I don’t know what I may

have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn’t like to lose

anything by being learned wrong now.”

 

“Wrong?” said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. “Who do

you suppose would teach you wrong?”

 

“I don’t know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!” replied the old man,

turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands.

“I don’t suppose as anybody would, but I’d rather trust my own self

than another!”

 

These answers and his manner were strange enough to cause my

guardian to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt, as we all walked across

Lincoln’s Inn together, whether Mr. Krook were really, as his

lodger represented him, deranged. The young surgeon replied, no,

he had seen no reason to think so. He was exceedingly distrustful,

as ignorance usually was, and he was always more or less under the

influence of raw gin, of which he drank great quantities and of

which he and his back-shop, as we might have observed, smelt

strongly; but he did not think him mad as yet.

 

On our way home, I so conciliated Peepy’s affections by buying him

a windmill and two flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to

take off his hat and gloves and would sit nowhere at dinner but at

my side. Caddy sat upon the other side of me, next to Ada, to whom

we imparted the whole history of the engagement as soon as we got

back. We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy brightened

exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were

all very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney-coach, with Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill.

 

I have forgotten to mention—at least I have not mentioned—that

Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at

Mr. Badger’s. Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day.

Or that he came. Or that when they were all gone and I said to

Ada, “Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!”

Ada laughed and said—

 

But I don’t think it matters what my darling said. She was always

merry.