Bleak House
very unusual indeed—a stranger. A portly, important-looking
gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold
watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon
his little finger.
“This,” said my godmother in an undertone, “is the child.” Then she
said in her naturally stern way of speaking, “This is Esther, sir.”
The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, “Come
here, my dear!” He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my
bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said,
“Ah!” and afterwards “Yes!” And then, taking off his eye-glasses and
folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair,
turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod.
Upon that, my godmother said, “You may go upstairs, Esther!” And I
made him my curtsy and left him.
It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen,
when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was
reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o’clock
as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading from St.
John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the
dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.
“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said
unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her!’”
I was stopped by my godmother’s rising, putting her hand to her head,
and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of the book,
“‘Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And
what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!’”
In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she
fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had
sounded through the house and been heard in the street.
She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little
altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I so
well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and
in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers
might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her,
asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me
the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was
immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her frown remained
unsoftened.
On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman in
black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by Mrs.
Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never gone
away.
“My name is Kenge,” he said; “you may remember it, my child; Kenge
and Carboy, Lincoln’s Inn.”
I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.
“Pray be seated—here near me. Don’t distress yourself; it’s of no
use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn’t inform you who were acquainted with the
late Miss Barbary’s affairs, that her means die with her and that
this young lady, now her aunt is dead—”
“My aunt, sir!”
“It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to
be gained by it,” said Mr. Kenge smoothly, “Aunt in fact, though not
in law. Don’t distress yourself! Don’t weep! Don’t tremble! Mrs.
Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of—the—a—Jarndyce and
Jarndyce.”
“Never,” said Mrs. Rachael.
“Is it possible,” pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses,
“that our young friend—I BEG you won’t distress yourself!—never
heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!”
I shook my head, wondering even what it was.
“Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?” said Mr. Kenge, looking over his
glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he
were petting something. “Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits
known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a monument of
Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty, every
contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known
in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a cause
that could not exist out of this free and great country. I should
say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mrs.
Rachael”—I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I appeared
inattentive—“amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty to SEVEN-ty
THOUSAND POUNDS!” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair.
I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it even
then.
“And she really never heard of the cause!” said Mr. Kenge.
“Surprising!”
“Miss Barbary, sir,” returned Mrs. Rachael, “who is now among the
Seraphim—”
“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr. Kenge politely.
“—Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her. And
she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more.”
“Well!” said Mr. Kenge. “Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the
point,” addressing me. “Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact
that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being
deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs.
Rachael—”
“Oh, dear no!” said Mrs. Rachael quickly.
“Quite so,” assented Mr. Kenge; “—that Mrs. Rachael should charge
herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won’t distress
yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer
which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and
which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the
lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow
that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly
humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself
by any stretch of my professional caution?” said Mr. Kenge, leaning
back in his chair again and looking calmly at us both.
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I
couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great
importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with
obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music
with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much
impressed by him—even then, before I knew that he formed himself on
the model of a great lord who was his client and that he was
generally called Conversation Kenge.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he pursued, “being aware of the—I would say,
desolate—position of our young friend, offers to place her at a
first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed,
where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants shall
be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to discharge
her duty in that station of life unto which it has pleased—shall I
say Providence?—to call her.”
My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his
affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though I
tried.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he went on, “makes no condition beyond expressing his
expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove herself
from the establishment in question without his knowledge and
concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the
acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which she
will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the paths of
virtue and honour, and—the—a——so forth.”
I was still less able to speak than before.
“Now, what does our young friend say?” proceeded Mr. Kenge. “Take
time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!”
What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need not
repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth
the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could
never relate.
This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as I
knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all
necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.
Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have known
her better after so many years and ought to have made myself enough
of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she gave me one
cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone
porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable and
self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I
knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!
“No, Esther!” she returned. “It is your misfortune!”
The coach was at the little lawn-gate—we had not come out until we
heard the wheels—and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She
went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the
door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the
window through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the
little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old
hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first
thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost
and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her
own shawl and quietly laid her—I am half ashamed to tell it—in the
garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no
companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.
When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the
straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high
window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of
spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night’s snow, and
the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like
metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There
was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat and looked
very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat gazing out of the
other window and took no notice of me.
I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of
her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange place
I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what they
would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in the
coach gave me a terrible start.
It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”
I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a
whisper, “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the
gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking
out of his window.
“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.
“I didn’t know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.
“But you are!” said the gentleman. “Look here!” He came quite
opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his
large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed
me that it was wet.
“There! Now you know you are,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And what are you crying for?” said the gentleman, “Don’t you want to
go there?”
“Where, sir?”
“Where? Why, wherever you are going,” said the gentleman.
“I am very glad to go there, sir,” I answered.
“Well, then! Look glad!” said the gentleman.
I thought he was very strange, or at least that what I could see of
him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his face
was almost hidden in a fur cap with broad fur straps at the side of
his head fastened under his chin; but I was composed again, and not
afraid of him. So I told him that I thought I must have been crying
because of my godmother’s death and because of Mrs. Rachael’s not
being sorry to part with me.
“Confound Mrs. Rachael!” said the gentleman. “Let her fly away in a
high wind on a broomstick!”
I began to be really afraid of him now and looked at him with the
greatest astonishment. But I thought that he had pleasant eyes,