Bleak House
should be driven mad! It is only by resenting them, and by revenging
them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get,
that I am able to keep my wits together. It is only that!” he said,
speaking in a homely, rustic way and with great vehemence. “You may
tell me that I over-excite myself. I answer that it’s in my nature to
do it, under wrong, and I must do it. There’s nothing between doing
it, and sinking into the smiling state of the poor little mad woman
that haunts the court. If I was once to sit down under it, I should
become imbecile.”
The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his
face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied what
he said, were most painful to see.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he said, “consider my case. As true as there is a
heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father
(a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so forth to my
mother for her life. After my mother’s death, all was to come to me
except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was then to pay my
brother. My mother died. My brother some time afterwards claimed his
legacy. I and some of my relations said that he had had a part of it
already in board and lodging and some other things. Now mind! That
was the question, and nothing else. No one disputed the will; no one
disputed anything but whether part of that three hundred pounds had
been already paid or not. To settle that question, my brother filing
a bill, I was obliged to go into this accursed Chancery; I was forced
there because the law forced me and would let me go nowhere else.
Seventeen people were made defendants to that simple suit! It first
came on after two years. It was then stopped for another two years
while the master (may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my
father’s son, about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal
creature. He then found out that there were not defendants
enough—remember, there were only seventeen as yet!—but that we must
have another who had been left out and must begin all over again. The
costs at that time—before the thing was begun!—were three times the
legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to
escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my
father’s, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen
into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else—and here I
stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are thousands
and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds. Is mine
less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole living was
in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?”
Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and
that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by this
monstrous system.
“There again!” said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage. “The
system! I am told on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look to
individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into court and say, ‘My
Lord, I beg to know this from you—is this right or wrong? Have you
the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore am
dismissed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer
the system. I mustn’t go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me furious by
being so cool and satisfied—as they all do, for I know they gain by
it while I lose, don’t I?—I mustn’t say to him, ‘I will have
something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul!’ HE is
not responsible. It’s the system. But, if I do no violence to any of
them, here—I may! I don’t know what may happen if I am carried
beyond myself at last! I will accuse the individual workers of that
system against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!”
His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage
without seeing it.
“I have done!” he said, sitting down and wiping his face. “Mr.
Jarndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it. I
have been in prison for contempt of court. I have been in prison for
threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that
trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I
sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it amusing,
too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in custody and
all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained
myself. I tell them that if I did restrain myself I should become
imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in
my part of the country say they remember me so, but now I must have
this vent under my sense of injury or nothing could hold my wits
together. It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley,’ the Lord
Chancellor told me last week, ‘not to waste your time here, and to
stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.’ ‘My Lord, my Lord, I
know it would,’ said I to him, ‘and it would have been far better for
me never to have heard the name of your high office, but unhappily
for me, I can’t undo the past, and the past drives me here!’
Besides,” he added, breaking fiercely out, “I’ll shame them. To the
last, I’ll show myself in that court to its shame. If I knew when I
was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a voice to
speak with, I would die there, saying, ‘You have brought me here and
sent me from here many and many a time. Now send me out feet
foremost!’”
His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its
contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was
quiet.
“I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour,” he said,
going to them again, “and let them play about. I didn’t mean to say
all this, but it don’t much signify. You’re not afraid of me, Tom,
are you?”
“No!” said Tom. “You ain’t angry with ME.”
“You are right, my child. You’re going back, Charley? Aye? Come then,
little one!” He took the youngest child on his arm, where she was
willing enough to be carried. “I shouldn’t wonder if we found a
ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let’s go and look for him!”
He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a
certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went
downstairs to his room.
Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our
arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really very
pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes.
Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and surprising
energy—intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious
blacksmith—and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years
ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous
combativeness upon—a sort of Young Love among the thorns—when the
Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated him with the exact
thing he wanted. There they were, matched, ever afterwards! Otherwise
he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns, or
he might have been a great politician, dealing in all sorts of
parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he and the Court of Chancery
had fallen upon each other in the pleasantest way, and nobody was
much the worse, and Gridley was, so to speak, from that hour provided
for. Then look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father
of these charming children) illustrated the same principle! He, Mr.
Skimpole, himself, had sometimes repined at the existence of
Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He could had dispensed
with Coavinses. There had been times when, if he had been a sultan,
and his grand vizier had said one morning, “What does the Commander
of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?” he might have
even gone so far as to reply, “The head of Coavinses!” But what
turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving
employment to a most deserving man, that he had been a benefactor to
Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up
these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these
social virtues! Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled and the
tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room and
thought, “I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little
comforts were MY work!”
There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these
fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of
the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even
as he turned towards us from a little private talk with Mrs. Blinder.
We kissed Charley, and took her downstairs with us, and stopped
outside the house to see her run away to her work. I don’t know where
she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature in
her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way at the bottom of
the court and melt into the city’s strife and sound like a dewdrop in
an ocean.
CHAPTER XVI
Tom-all-Alone’s
My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished
fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her. To-day she
is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow
she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence can with
confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester’s gallantry has some trouble
to keep pace with her. It would have more but that his other faithful
ally, for better and for worse—the gout—darts into the old oak
bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both legs.
Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a
demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male
line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory of
man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved,
sir. Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism or may have
taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar, but
the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive even to the
levelling process of dying by dying of their own family gout. It has
come down through the illustrious line like the plate, or the
pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities.
Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though he
has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the
discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the
aristocracy, “My lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to
you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout.”
Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family disorder
as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure. He feels
that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and spasmodically
twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken somewhere,
but he thinks, “We have all yielded to this; it belongs to us; it has
for some hundreds of years been understood that we are not to make
the vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble terms; and I
submit myself to the compromise.”
And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in
the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of
my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long
perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with
soft reliefs of shadow. Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages in
the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was still a
chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and rode
a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness. Inside,
his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, “Each of us was
a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of himself and
melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices of the rooks