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

gently, and kindly, and very

distinctly. “My dear, I think so now. If any real disadvantage

can attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman worth a

thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not

magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature.”

 

I sat down and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought

to be, “One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these

words: ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.

The time will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this

better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.’” I had

covered my face with my hands in repeating the words, but I took

them away now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him

that to him I owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to

that hour never, never, never felt it. He put up his hand as if to

stop me. I well knew that he was never to be thanked, and said no

more.

 

“Nine years, my dear,” he said after thinking for a little while,

“have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in

seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it

unlike all other letters I have ever read. It was written to me

(as it told me in so many words), perhaps because it was the

writer’s idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me, perhaps because it

was mine to justify it. It told me of a child, an orphan girl then

twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those which live in

your remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred her in

secrecy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence,

and that if the writer were to die before the child became a woman,

she would be left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It

asked me to consider if I would, in that case, finish what the

writer had begun.”

 

I listened in silence and looked attentively at him.

 

“Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium

through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and

the distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of

the need there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she

was quite innocent. I felt concerned for the little creature, in

her darkened life, and replied to the letter.”

 

I took his hand and kissed it.

 

“It laid the injunction on me that I should never propose to see

the writer, who had long been estranged from all intercourse with

the world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would

appoint one. I accredited Mr. Kenge. The lady said, of her own

accord and not of his seeking, that her name was an assumed one.

That she was, if there were any ties of blood in such a case, the

child’s aunt. That more than this she would never (and he was well

persuaded of the steadfastness of her resolution) for any human

consideration disclose. My dear, I have told you all.”

 

I held his hand for a little while in mine.

 

“I saw my ward oftener than she saw me,” he added, cheerily making

light of it, “and I always knew she was beloved, useful, and happy.

She repays me twenty-thousandfold, and twenty more to that, every

hour in every day!”

 

“And oftener still,” said I, “she blesses the guardian who is a

father to her!”

 

At the word father, I saw his former trouble come into his face.

He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had

been there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as

if they had given him a shock. I again inwardly repeated,

wondering, “That I could readily understand. None that I could

readily understand!” No, it was true. I did not understand it.

Not for many and many a day.

 

“Take a fatherly good night, my dear,” said he, kissing me on the

forehead, “and so to rest. These are late hours for working and

thinking. You do that for all of us, all day long, little

housekeeper!”

 

I neither worked nor thought any more that night. I opened my

grateful heart to heaven in thankfulness for its providence to me

and its care of me, and fell asleep.

 

We had a visitor next day. Mr. Allan Woodcourt came. He came to

take leave of us; he had settled to do so beforehand. He was going

to China and to India as a surgeon on board ship. He was to be

away a long, long time.

 

I believe—at least I know—that he was not rich. All his widowed

mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for his

profession. It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with

very little influence in London; and although he was, night and

day, at the service of numbers of poor people and did wonders of

gentleness and skill for them, he gained very little by it in

money. He was seven years older than I. Not that I need mention

it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything.

 

I think—I mean, he told us—that he had been in practice three or

four years and that if he could have hoped to contend through three

or four more, he would not have made the voyage on which he was

bound. But he had no fortune or private means, and so he was going

away. He had been to see us several times altogether. We thought

it a pity he should go away. Because he was distinguished in his

art among those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men

belonging to it had a high opinion of him.

 

When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother with him for

the first time. She was a pretty old lady, with bright black eyes,

but she seemed proud. She came from Wales and had had, a long time

ago, an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan ap-Kerrig—of some place that sounded like Gimlet—who was the most

illustrious person that ever was known and all of whose relations

were a sort of royal family. He appeared to have passed his life

in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and a

bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his praises

in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it,

Mewlinnwillinwodd.

 

Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her great

kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would

remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance

below it. She told him that there were many handsome English

ladies in India who went out on speculation, and that there were

some to be picked up with property, but that neither charms nor

wealth would suffice for the descendant from such a line without

birth, which must ever be the first consideration. She talked so

much about birth that for a moment I half fancied, and with pain—

But what an idle fancy to suppose that she could think or care what

MINE was!

 

Mr. Woodcourt seemed a little distressed by her prolixity, but he

was too considerate to let her see it and contrived delicately to

bring the conversation round to making his acknowledgments to my

guardian for his hospitality and for the very happy hours—he

called them the very happy hours—he had passed with us. The

recollection of them, he said, would go with him wherever he went

and would be always treasured. And so we gave him our hands, one

after another—at least, they did—and I did; and so he put his

lips to Ada’s hand—and to mine; and so he went away upon his long,

long voyage!

 

I was very busy indeed all day and wrote directions home to the

servants, and wrote notes for my guardian, and dusted his books and

papers, and jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one way and

another. I was still busy between the lights, singing and working

by the window, when who should come in but Caddy, whom I had no

expectation of seeing!

 

“Why, Caddy, my dear,” said I, “what beautiful flowers!”

 

She had such an exquisite little nosegay in her hand.

 

“Indeed, I think so, Esther,” replied Caddy. “They are the

loveliest I ever saw.”

 

“Prince, my dear?” said I in a whisper.

 

“No,” answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to

smell. “Not Prince.”

 

“Well, to be sure, Caddy!” said I. “You must have two lovers!”

 

“What? Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Caddy.

 

“Do they look like that sort of thing?” I repeated, pinching her

cheek.

 

Caddy only laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for

half an hour, at the expiration of which time Prince would be

waiting for her at the corner, sat chatting with me and Ada in the

window, every now and then handing me the flowers again or trying

how they looked against my hair. At last, when she was going, she

took me into my room and put them in my dress.

 

“For me?” said I, surprised.

 

“For you,” said Caddy with a kiss. “They were left behind by

somebody.”

 

“Left behind?”

 

“At poor Miss Flite’s,” said Caddy. “Somebody who has been very

good to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and left

these flowers behind. No, no! Don’t take them out. Let the

pretty little things lie here,” said Caddy, adjusting them with a

careful hand, “because I was present myself, and I shouldn’t wonder

if somebody left them on purpose!”

 

“Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Ada, coming laughingly

behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. “Oh, yes,

indeed they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort

of thing. Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!”