Bleak House
naturally said, “Esther! You to be low-spirited. YOU!” And it really
was time to say so, for I—yes, I really did see myself in the glass,
almost crying. “As if you had anything to make you unhappy, instead
of everything to make you happy, you ungrateful heart!” said I.
If I could have made myself go to sleep, I would have done it
directly, but not being able to do that, I took out of my basket some
ornamental work for our house (I mean Bleak House) that I was busy
with at that time and sat down to it with great determination. It was
necessary to count all the stitches in that work, and I resolved to
go on with it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and then to go to
bed.
I soon found myself very busy. But I had left some silk downstairs in
a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a stop
for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get it. To
my great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still there, and
sitting looking at the ashes. He was lost in thought, his book lay
unheeded by his side, his silvered iron-grey hair was scattered
confusedly upon his forehead as though his hand had been wandering
among it while his thoughts were elsewhere, and his face looked worn.
Almost frightened by coming upon him so unexpectedly, I stood still
for a moment and should have retired without speaking had he not, in
again passing his hand abstractedly through his hair, seen me and
started.
“Esther!”
I told him what I had come for.
“At work so late, my dear?”
“I am working late to-night,” said I, “because I couldn’t sleep and
wished to tire myself. But, dear guardian, you are late too, and look
weary. You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?”
“None, little woman, that YOU would readily understand,” said he.
He spoke in a regretful tone so new to me that I inwardly repeated,
as if that would help me to his meaning, “That I could readily
understand!”
“Remain a moment, Esther,” said he, “You were in my thoughts.”
“I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?”
He slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner. The change
was so remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so much
self-command, that I found myself again inwardly repeating, “None
that I could understand!”
“Little woman,” said my guardian, “I was thinking—that is, I have
been thinking since I have been sitting here—that you ought to know
of your own history all I know. It is very little. Next to nothing.”
“Dear guardian,” I replied, “when you spoke to me before on that
subject—”
“But since then,” he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant to
say, “I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and my
having anything to tell you, are different considerations, Esther. It
is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know.”
“If you think so, guardian, it is right.”
“I think so,” he returned very 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!”