Bleak House
now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to
utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence,
soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend
why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn
should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this
distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible
intelligence.
“Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” returns Mr. Bucket, “put it
to her ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her ladyship, if you
think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You’ll find,
or I’m much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the
intention of communicating the whole to you as soon as he considered
it ripe, and further, that he had given her ladyship so to
understand. Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very
morning when I examined the body! You don’t know what I’m going to
say and do five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might
wonder why I hadn’t done it, don’t you see?”
True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble those obtrusive
sounds, says, “True.” At this juncture a considerable noise of voices
is heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the
library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he
draws in his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, “Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken
air, as I expected it might, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut
down so sudden. The chance to hush it is to let in these people now
in a wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind sitting quiet—on the
family account—while I reckon ’em up? And would you just throw in a
nod when I seem to ask you for it?”
Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, “Officer. The best you can, the
best you can!” and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook of
the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices quickly
die away. He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead of Mercury
and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who
bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another
man and two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the chair in
an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercuries and
locks the door again. Sir Leicester looks on at this invasion of the
sacred precincts with an icy stare.
“Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen,” says Mr. Bucket
in a confidential voice. “I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I
am; and this,” producing the tip of his convenient little staff from
his breast-pocket, “is my authority. Now, you wanted to see Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You do see him, and mind you, it
ain’t every one as is admitted to that honour. Your name, old
gentleman, is Smallweed; that’s what your name is; I know it well.”
“Well, and you never heard any harm of it!” cries Mr. Smallweed in a
shrill loud voice.
“You don’t happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?” retorts
Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper.
“No!”
“Why, they killed him,” says Mr. Bucket, “on account of his having so
much cheek. Don’t YOU get into the same position, because it isn’t
worthy of you. You ain’t in the habit of conversing with a deaf
person, are you?”
“Yes,” snarls Mr. Smallweed, “my wife’s deaf.”
“That accounts for your pitching your voice so high. But as she ain’t
here; just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and I’ll not
only be obliged to you, but it’ll do you more credit,” says Mr.
Bucket. “This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?”
“Name of Chadband,” Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a
much lower key.
“Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name,” says Mr.
Bucket, offering his hand, “and consequently feel a liking for it.
Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?”
“And Mrs. Snagsby,” Mr. Smallweed introduces.
“Husband a law-stationer and a friend of my own,” says Mr. Bucket.
“Love him like a brother! Now, what’s up?”
“Do you mean what business have we come upon?” Mr. Smallweed asks, a
little dashed by the suddenness of this turn.
“Ah! You know what I mean. Let us hear what it’s all about in
presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Come.”
Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a moment’s counsel with
him in a whisper. Mr. Chadband, expressing a considerable amount of
oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his hands, says
aloud, “Yes. You first!” and retires to his former place.
“I was the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn,” pipes Grandfather
Smallweed then; “I did business with him. I was useful to him, and he
was useful to me. Krook, dead and gone, was my brother-in-law. He was
own brother to a brimstone magpie—leastways Mrs. Smallweed. I come
into Krook’s property. I examined all his papers and all his effects.
They was all dug out under my eyes. There was a bundle of letters
belonging to a dead and gone lodger as was hid away at the back of a
shelf in the side of Lady Jane’s bed—his cat’s bed. He hid all
manner of things away, everywheres. Mr. Tulkinghorn wanted ’em and
got ’em, but I looked ’em over first. I’m a man of business, and I
took a squint at ’em. They was letters from the lodger’s sweetheart,
and she signed Honoria. Dear me, that’s not a common name, Honoria,
is it? There’s no lady in this house that signs Honoria is there? Oh,
no, I don’t think so! Oh, no, I don’t think so! And not in the same
hand, perhaps? Oh, no, I don’t think so!”
Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his
triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, “Oh, dear me! Oh, Lord! I’m shaken
all to pieces!”
“Now, when you’re ready,” says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his
recovery, “to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know.”
“Haven’t I come to it, Mr. Bucket?” cries Grandfather Smallweed.
“Isn’t the gentleman concerned yet? Not with Captain Hawdon, and his
ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain? Come,
then, I want to know where those letters are. That concerns me, if it
don’t concern Sir Leicester Dedlock. I will know where they are. I
won’t have ’em disappear so quietly. I handed ’em over to my friend
and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, not to anybody else.”
“Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too,” says Mr.
Bucket.
“I don’t care for that. I want to know who’s got ’em. And I tell you
what we want—what we all here want, Mr. Bucket. We want more
painstaking and search-making into this murder. We know where the
interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough. If George
the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice,
and was set on. You know what I mean as well as any man.”
“Now I tell you what,” says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering his
manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary
fascination to the forefinger, “I am damned if I am a-going to have
my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as half
a second of time by any human being in creation. YOU want more
painstaking and search-making! YOU do? Do you see this hand, and do
you think that I don’t know the right time to stretch it out and put
it on the arm that fired that shot?”
Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is
that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize.
Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.
“The advice I give you is, don’t you trouble your head about the
murder. That’s my affair. You keep half an eye on the newspapers, and
I shouldn’t wonder if you was to read something about it before long,
if you look sharp. I know my business, and that’s all I’ve got to say
to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to know
who’s got ’em. I don’t mind telling you. I have got ’em. Is that the
packet?”
Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr.
Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it
as the same.
“What have you got to say next?” asks Mr. Bucket. “Now, don’t open
your mouth too wide, because you don’t look handsome when you do it.”
“I want five hundred pound.”
“No, you don’t; you mean fifty,” says Mr. Bucket humorously.
It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.
“That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to consider
(without admitting or promising anything) this bit of business,” says
Mr. Bucket—Sir Leicester mechanically bows his head—“and you ask me
to consider a proposal of five hundred pounds. Why, it’s an
unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad enough, but better than
that. Hadn’t you better say two fifty?”
Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not.
“Then,” says Mr. Bucket, “let’s hear Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a time
I’ve heard my old fellow-serjeant of that name; and a moderate man he
was in all respects, as ever I come across!”
Thus invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and after a little sleek
smiling and a little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands,
delivers himself as follows, “My friends, we are now—Rachael, my
wife, and I—in the mansions of the rich and great. Why are we now in
the mansions of the rich and great, my friends? Is it because we are
invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them, because we are
bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the lute
with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are
we here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and do
we require corn, and wine, and oil, or what is much the same thing,
money, for the keeping thereof? Probably so, my friends.”
“You’re a man of business, you are,” returns Mr. Bucket, very
attentive, “and consequently you’re going on to mention what the
nature of your secret is. You are right. You couldn’t do better.”
“Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love,” says Mr. Chadband
with a cunning eye, “proceed unto it. Rachael, my wife, advance!”
Mrs. Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her husband
into the background and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard, frowning
smile.
“Since you want to know what we know,” says she, “I’ll tell you. I
helped to bring up Miss Hawdon, her ladyship’s daughter. I was in the
service of her ladyship’s sister, who was very sensitive to the
disgrace her ladyship brought upon her, and gave out, even to her
ladyship, that the child was dead—she WAS very nearly so—when she
was born. But she’s alive, and I know her.” With these words, and a
laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word “ladyship,” Mrs.
Chadband folds her arms and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket.
“I suppose now,” returns that officer, “YOU will be expecting a
twenty-pound note or a present of about that figure?”
Mrs. Chadband merely laughs and contemptuously tells him he can
“offer” twenty pence.
“My friend the law-stationer’s good lady, over there,” says Mr.
Bucket, luring Mrs. Snagsby forward with the finger. “What may YOUR
game be, ma’am?”
Mrs. Snagsby is at first prevented, by tears and lamentations, from
stating the nature of her game, but by degrees it confusedly comes to
light that she is a woman overwhelmed with injuries and wrongs, whom
Mr. Snagsby has habitually deceived, abandoned, and sought to keep in
darkness, and whose chief comfort, under her afflictions, has been
the sympathy of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, who showed so much
commiseration for her on one occasion of his calling in Cook’s Court
in the absence of her perjured husband that she has of late
habitually carried to him all her woes. Everybody it appears, the