Bleak House
mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised
to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon
the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would
have seemed! Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within
him ever burned for one woman who held him in her heart, where is
she, while these ashes are above the ground!
It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby’s, in Cook’s Court,
where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself
allows—not to put too fine a point upon it—out of one fit into
twenty. The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender
heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been
imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint. Be it what it may,
now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby’s
account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time
she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch
cheese, and fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came
out of to go into another, and another, and so on through a chain of
fits, with short intervals between, of which she has pathetically
availed herself by consuming them in entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not
to give her warning “when she quite comes to,” and also in appeals to
the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones and go to bed.
Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little dairy in
Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his on the
subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the most
patient of men, “I thought you was dead, I am sure!”
What question this enthusiastic fowl supposes he settles when he
strains himself to such an extent, or why he should thus crow (so men
crow on various triumphant public occasions, however) about what
cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair. It is enough that
daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes.
Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers
as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook’s and bears off
the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in churchyard,
pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated
to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed,
while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official
back-stairs—would to heaven they HAD departed!—are very complacent
and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would
reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they
bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial.
With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little
tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy
of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of
death in action close on life—here they lower our dear brother down
a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in
corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful
testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this
boastful island together.
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too
long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the
windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at
least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so
sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its
witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to
every passerby, “Look here!”
With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to
the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and
looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.
It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and
makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in
again a little while, and so departs.
Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who “can’t
exactly say” what will be done to him in greater hands than men’s,
thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a
distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: “He wos wery
good to me, he wos!”
CHAPTER XII
On the Watch
It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney
Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares,
for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The
fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad
tidings to benighted England. It has also found out that they will
entertain a brilliant and distinguished circle of the ELITE of the
BEAU MONDE (the fashionable intelligence is weak in English, but a
giant refreshed in French) at the ancient and hospitable family seat
in Lincolnshire.
For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished circle, and
of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the broken arch of the bridge in
the park is mended; and the water, now retired within its proper
limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect
from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle
woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves
and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows
of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It
looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars
and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart
the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece, it throws a
broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the
hearth and seems to rend it.
Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and
Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady’s woman and Sir
Leicester’s man affectionate in the rumble), start for home. With a
considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging
demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two centaurs
with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they
rattle out of the yard of the Hôtel Bristol in the Place Vendôme and
canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de
Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and
queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the
Gate of the Star, out of Paris.
Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady
Dedlock has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre,
drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens. Only
last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay—within the walls playing
with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace
Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more
Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles
filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a
word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little
gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing
Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking,
tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and
much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate—only last Sunday, my
Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair,
almost hated her own maid for being in spirits.
She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies
before her, as it lies behind—her Ariel has put a girdle of it round
the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped—but the imperfect remedy
is always to fly from the last place where it has been experienced.
Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging it for endless
avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let
it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star a white speck
glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a plain—two dark
square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow descending on it
aslant, like the angels in Jacob’s dream!
Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored.
When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own
greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so
inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in
his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to
society.
“You have an unusual amount of correspondence this morning?” says my
Lady after a long time. She is fatigued with reading. Has almost read
a page in twenty miles.
“Nothing in it, though. Nothing whatever.”
“I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s long effusions, I think?”
“You see everything,” says Sir Leicester with admiration.
“Ha!” sighs my Lady. “He is the most tiresome of men!”
“He sends—I really beg your pardon—he sends,” says Sir Leicester,
selecting the letter and unfolding it, “a message to you. Our
stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out of
my memory. I beg you’ll excuse me. He says—” Sir Leicester is so
long in taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady looks
a little irritated. “He says ‘In the matter of the right of way—’ I
beg your pardon, that’s not the place. He says—yes! Here I have it!
He says, ‘I beg my respectful compliments to my Lady, who, I hope,
has benefited by the change. Will you do me the favour to mention (as
it may interest her) that I have something to tell her on her return
in reference to the person who copied the affidavit in the Chancery
suit, which so powerfully stimulated her curiosity. I have seen
him.’”
My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window.
“That’s the message,” observes Sir Leicester.
“I should like to walk a little,” says my Lady, still looking out of
her window.
“Walk?” repeats Sir Leicester in a tone of surprise.
“I should like to walk a little,” says my Lady with unmistakable
distinctness. “Please to stop the carriage.”
The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the
rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient to an
impatient motion of my Lady’s hand. My Lady alights so quickly and
walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all his scrupulous
politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A space of a
minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her. She smiles,
looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of
a mile, is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage.
The rattle and clatter continue through the greater part of three
days, with more or less of bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more
or less plunging of centaurs and bare-backed horses. Their courtly
politeness to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme
of general admiration. Though my Lord IS a little aged for my Lady,
says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be
her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each
other. One observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in
hand, to help my Lady to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady,
how recognisant of my Lord’s politeness, with an inclination of her
gracious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers! It is
ravishing!
The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about like
the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose
countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in
whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the
Radical of Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it
after stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney
Wold, lying only one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire.
Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and
through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare