Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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Book online «Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗». Author Charles Dickens
“Miss Summerson really is my ward,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “I am
responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case.”
“Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?” said my Lady.
“Yes.”
“She is very fortunate in her guardian.”
Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was
indeed. All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost
expressive of displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her
shoulder again.
“Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr.
Jarndyce.”
“A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw
you last Sunday,” he returned.
“What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become
one to me!” she said with some disdain. “I have achieved that
reputation, I suppose.”
“You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock,” said my guardian, “that
you pay some little penalty, I dare say. But none to me.”
“So much!” she repeated, slightly laughing. “Yes!”
With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know
not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than
children. So, as she slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking
at the rain, she was as self-possessed and as free to occupy
herself with her own thoughts as if she had been alone.
“I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better
than you know me?” she said, looking at him again.
“Yes, we happened to meet oftener,” he returned.
“We went our several ways,” said Lady Dedlock, “and had little in
common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I
suppose, but it could not be helped.”
Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain. The storm soon began
to pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated, the lightning
ceased, the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun
began to glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat
there, silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at
a merry pace.
“The messenger is coming back, my Lady,” said the keeper, “with the
carriage.”
As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There
alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the
Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty
girl, the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence, the pretty girl
confused and hesitating.
“What now?” said Lady Dedlock. “Two!”
“I am your maid, my Lady, at the present,” said the Frenchwoman.
“The message was for the attendant.”
“I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady,” said the pretty girl.
“I did mean you, child,” replied her mistress calmly. “Put that
shawl on me.”
She slightly stooped her shoulders to receive it, and the pretty
girl lightly dropped it in its place. The Frenchwoman stood
unnoticed, looking on with her lips very tightly set.
“I am sorry,” said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, “that we are not
likely to renew our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send
the carriage back for your two wards. It shall be here directly.”
But as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a
graceful leave of Ada—none of me—and put her hand upon his
proffered arm, and got into the carriage, which was a little, low,
park carriage with a hood.
“Come in, child,” she said to the pretty girl; “I shall want you.
Go on!”
The carriage rolled away, and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers
she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she
had alighted.
I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as pride
itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her
retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She
remained perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the
drive, and then, without the least discomposure of countenance,
slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked
deliberately in the same direction through the wettest of the wet
grass.
“Is that young woman mad?” said my guardian.
“Oh, no, sir!” said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking
after her. “Hortense is not one of that sort. She has as good a
head-piece as the best. But she’s mortal high and passionate—
powerful high and passionate; and what with having notice to leave,
and having others put above her, she don’t take kindly to it.”
“But why should she walk shoeless through all that water?” said my
guardian.
“Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!” said the man.
“Or unless she fancies it’s blood,” said the woman. “She’d as soon
walk through that as anything else, I think, when her own’s up!”
We passed not far from the house a few minutes afterwards.
Peaceful as it had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more
so now, with a diamond spray glittering all about it, a light wind
blowing, the birds no longer hushed but singing strongly,
everything refreshed by the late rain, and the little carriage
shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver.
Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful
figure too in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless,
through the wet grass.
Moving On
It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good
ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers
are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of
ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse
their papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where.
The courts are all shut up; the public offices lie in a hot sleep.
Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales
might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found
there, walk.
The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants’ Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn even
unto the Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where
stranded proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on
lop-sided stools that will not recover their perpendicular until
the current of Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the
long vacation. Outer doors of chambers are shut up by the score,
messages and parcels are to be left at the Porter’s Lodge by the
bushel. A crop of grass would grow in the chinks of the stone
pavement outside Lincoln’s Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters,
who have nothing to do beyond sitting in the shade there, with
their white aprons over their heads to keep the flies off, grub it
up and eat it thoughtfully.
There is only one judge in town. Even he only comes twice a week
to sit in chambers. If the country folks of those assize towns on
his circuit could see him now! No full-bottomed wig, no red
petticoats, no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands. Merely a
close-shaved gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-bronze on the judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by
the solar rays from the judicial nose, who calls in at the shell-fish shop as he comes along and drinks iced ginger-beer!
The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How
England can get on through four long summer months without its bar
—which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only
legitimate triumph in prosperity—is beside the question; assuredly
that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The
learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the
unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by
the opposite party that he never seems likely to recover it is
doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland. The
learned gentleman who does the withering business and who blights
all opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a
French watering-place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint
on the smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks.
The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his
gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has
become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the
drowsy bench with legal “chaff,” inexplicable to the uninitiated
and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic
delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed
fragments of the same great palladium are to be found on the canals
of Venice, at the second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of
Germany, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the English coast.
Scarcely one is to be encountered in the deserted region of
Chancery Lane. If such a lonely member of the bar do flit across
the waste and come upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave
off haunting the scenes of his anxiety, they frighten one another
and retreat into opposite shades.
It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the
young clerks are madly in love, and according to their various
degrees, pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate,
Ramsgate, or Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks think their
families too large. All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns
of Court and pant about staircases and other dry places seeking
water give short howls of aggravation. All the blind men’s dogs in
the streets draw their masters against pumps or trip them over
buckets. A shop with a sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a
bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a sanctuary. Temple
Bar gets so hot that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet
Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all
night.
There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be
cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in
dullness; but the little thoroughfares immediately outside those
retirements seem to blaze. In Mr. Krook’s court, it is so hot that
the people turn their houses inside out and sit in chairs upon the
pavement—Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with
his cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol’s Arms has
discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little
Swills is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he
comes out in quite an innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a
juvenile complexion calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the
feelings of the most fastidious mind.
Over all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil
of rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the
long vacation. Mr. Snagsby, lawstationer of Cook’s Court,
Cursitor Street, is sensible of the influence not only in his mind
as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but also in his business as
a lawstationer aforesaid. He has more leisure for musing in
Staple Inn and in the Rolls Yard during the long vacation than at
other seasons, and he says to the two ‘prentices, what a thing it
is in such hot weather to think that you live in an island with the
sea a-rolling and a-bowling right round you.
Guster is busy in the little drawing-room on this present afternoon
in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in
contemplation to receive company. The expected guests are rather
select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and no more.
From Mr. Chadband’s being much given to describe himself, both
verbally and in
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