Bleak House
“I intend to, Mat,” replies the other. “I would sooner take her
opinion than that of a college.”
“College,” returns Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like. “What
college could you leave—in another quarter of the world—with
nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella—to make its way home to
Europe? The old girl would do it to-morrow. Did it once!”
“You are right,” says Mr. George.
“What college,” pursues Bagnet, “could you set up in life—with two
penn’orth of white lime—a penn’orth of fuller’s earth—a ha’porth of
sand—and the rest of the change out of sixpence in money? That’s
what the old girl started on. In the present business.”
“I am rejoiced to hear it’s thriving, Mat.”
“The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet, acquiescing, “saves. Has a stocking
somewhere. With money in it. I never saw it. But I know she’s got it.
Wait till the greens is off her mind. Then she’ll set you up.”
“She is a treasure!” exclaims Mr. George.
“She’s more. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be
maintained. It was the old girl that brought out my musical
abilities. I should have been in the artillery now but for the old
girl. Six years I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute. The old
girl said it wouldn’t do; intention good, but want of flexibility;
try the bassoon. The old girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster
of the Rifle Regiment. I practised in the trenches. Got on, got
another, get a living by it!”
George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an
apple.
“The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet in reply, “is a thoroughly fine
woman. Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as
she gets on. I never saw the old girl’s equal. But I never own to it
before her. Discipline must be maintained!”
Proceeding to converse on indifferent matters, they walk up and down
the little street, keeping step and time, until summoned by Quebec
and Malta to do justice to the pork and greens, over which Mrs.
Bagnet, like a military chaplain, says a short grace. In the
distribution of these comestibles, as in every other household duty,
Mrs. Bagnet develops an exact system, sitting with every dish before
her, allotting to every portion of pork its own portion of
pot-liquor, greens, potatoes, and even mustard, and serving it out
complete. Having likewise served out the beer from a can and thus
supplied the mess with all things necessary, Mrs. Bagnet proceeds to
satisfy her own hunger, which is in a healthy state. The kit of the
mess, if the table furniture may be so denominated, is chiefly
composed of utensils of horn and tin that have done duty in several
parts of the world. Young Woolwich’s knife, in particular, which is
of the oyster kind, with the additional feature of a strong
shutting-up movement which frequently balks the appetite of that
young musician, is mentioned as having gone in various hands the
complete round of foreign service.
The dinner done, Mrs. Bagnet, assisted by the younger branches (who
polish their own cups and platters, knives and forks), makes all the
dinner garniture shine as brightly as before and puts it all away,
first sweeping the hearth, to the end that Mr. Bagnet and the visitor
may not be retarded in the smoking of their pipes. These household
cares involve much pattening and counter-pattening in the backyard
and considerable use of a pail, which is finally so happy as to
assist in the ablutions of Mrs. Bagnet herself. That old girl
reappearing by and by, quite fresh, and sitting down to her
needlework, then and only then—the greens being only then to be
considered as entirely off her mind—Mr. Bagnet requests the trooper
to state his case.
This Mr. George does with great discretion, appearing to address
himself to Mr. Bagnet, but having an eye solely on the old girl all
the time, as Bagnet has himself. She, equally discreet, busies
herself with her needlework. The case fully stated, Mr. Bagnet
resorts to his standard artifice for the maintenance of discipline.
“That’s the whole of it, is it, George?” says he.
“That’s the whole of it.”
“You act according to my opinion?”
“I shall be guided,” replies George, “entirely by it.”
“Old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet, “give him my opinion. You know it. Tell
him what it is.”
It is that he cannot have too little to do with people who are too
deep for him and cannot be too careful of interference with matters
he does not understand—that the plain rule is to do nothing in the
dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never
to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. This, in effect, is
Mr. Bagnet’s opinion, as delivered through the old girl, and it so
relieves Mr. George’s mind by confirming his own opinion and
banishing his doubts that he composes himself to smoke another pipe
on that exceptional occasion and to have a talk over old times with
the whole Bagnet family, according to their various ranges of
experience.
Through these means it comes to pass that Mr. George does not again
rise to his full height in that parlour until the time is drawing on
when the bassoon and fife are expected by a British public at the
theatre; and as it takes time even then for Mr. George, in his
domestic character of Bluffy, to take leave of Quebec and Malta and
insinuate a sponsorial shilling into the pocket of his godson with
felicitations on his success in life, it is dark when Mr. George
again turns his face towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
“A family home,” he ruminates as he marches along, “however small it
is, makes a man like me look lonely. But it’s well I never made that
evolution of matrimony. I shouldn’t have been fit for it. I am such a
vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I couldn’t hold
to the gallery a month together if it was a regular pursuit or if I
didn’t camp there, gipsy fashion. Come! I disgrace nobody and cumber
nobody; that’s something. I have not done that for many a long year!”
So he whistles it off and marches on.
Arrived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and mounting Mr. Tulkinghorn’s stair,
he finds the outer door closed and the chambers shut, but the trooper
not knowing much about outer doors, and the staircase being dark
besides, he is yet fumbling and groping about, hoping to discover a
bell-handle or to open the door for himself, when Mr. Tulkinghorn
comes up the stairs (quietly, of course) and angrily asks, “Who is
that? What are you doing there?”
“I ask your pardon, sir. It’s George. The sergeant.”
“And couldn’t George, the sergeant, see that my door was locked?”
“Why, no, sir, I couldn’t. At any rate, I didn’t,” says the trooper,
rather nettled.
“Have you changed your mind? Or are you in the same mind?” Mr.
Tulkinghorn demands. But he knows well enough at a glance.
“In the same mind, sir.”
“I thought so. That’s sufficient. You can go. So you are the man,”
says Mr. Tulkinghorn, opening his door with the key, “in whose
hiding-place Mr. Gridley was found?”
“Yes, I AM the man,” says the trooper, stopping two or three stairs
down. “What then, sir?”
“What then? I don’t like your associates. You should not have seen
the inside of my door this morning if I had thought of your being
that man. Gridley? A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow.”
With these words, spoken in an unusually high tone for him, the
lawyer goes into his rooms and shuts the door with a thundering
noise.
Mr. George takes his dismissal in great dudgeon, the greater because
a clerk coming up the stairs has heard the last words of all and
evidently applies them to him. “A pretty character to bear,” the
trooper growls with a hasty oath as he strides downstairs. “A
threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow!” And looking up, he sees
the clerk looking down at him and marking him as he passes a lamp.
This so intensifies his dudgeon that for five minutes he is in an ill
humour. But he whistles that off like the rest of it and marches home
to the shooting gallery.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Ironmaster
Sir Leicester Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of the
family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a
figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in
Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds,
and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended,
and eke into Sir Leicester’s bones. The blazing fires of faggot and
coal—Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest—that blaze upon the
broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods,
sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The
hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the
cushioned doors and windows, and the screens and curtains fail to
supply the fires’ deficiencies and to satisfy Sir Leicester’s need.
Hence the fashionable intelligence proclaims one morning to the
listening earth that Lady Dedlock is expected shortly to return to
town for a few weeks.
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor
relations. Indeed great men have often more than their fair share of
poor relations, inasmuch as very red blood of the superior quality,
like inferior blood unlawfully shed, WILL cry aloud and WILL be
heard. Sir Leicester’s cousins, in the remotest degree, are so many
Murders in the respect that they “will out.” Among whom there are
cousins who are so poor that one might almost dare to think it would
have been the happier for them never to have been plated links upon
the Dedlock chain of gold, but to have been made of common iron at
first and done base service.
Service, however (with a few limited reservations, genteel but not
profitable), they may not do, being of the Dedlock dignity. So they
visit their richer cousins, and get into debt when they can, and live
but shabbily when they can’t, and find—the women no husbands, and
the men no wives—and ride in borrowed carriages, and sit at feasts
that are never of their own making, and so go through high life. The
rich family sum has been divided by so many figures, and they are the
something over that nobody knows what to do with.
Everybody on Sir Leicester Dedlock’s side of the question and of his
way of thinking would appear to be his cousin more or less. From my
Lord Boodle, through the Duke of Foodle, down to Noodle, Sir
Leicester, like a glorious spider, stretches his threads of
relationship. But while he is stately in the cousinship of the
Everybodys, he is a kind and generous man, according to his dignified
way, in the cousinship of the Nobodys; and at the present time, in
despite of the damp, he stays out the visit of several such cousins
at Chesney Wold with the constancy of a martyr.
Of these, foremost in the front rank stands Volumnia Dedlock, a young
lady (of sixty) who is doubly highly related, having the honour to be
a poor relation, by the mother’s side, to another great family. Miss
Volumnia, displaying in early life a pretty talent for cutting
ornaments out of coloured paper, and also for singing to the guitar
in the Spanish tongue, and propounding French conundrums in country
houses, passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and
forty in a sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date
and being considered to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the
Spanish language, she retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on
an annual present from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional
resurrections in the country houses of her cousins. She has an
extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with
thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that
dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of
an indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an